Cloud-based Service Providers Research Articles

A Mobile Education and Social Support Group Intervention for Improving Postpartum Health in Northern India: Development and Usability Study.

BackgroundStructural and cultural barriers limit Indian women’s access to adequate postnatal care and support despite their importance for maternal and neonatal health. Targeted postnatal education and support through a mobile health intervention may improve postnatal recovery, neonatal care practices, nutritional status, knowledge and care seeking, and mental health.ObjectiveWe sought to understand the feasibility and acceptability of our first pilot phase, a flexible 6-week postnatal mobile health intervention delivered to 3 groups of women in Punjab, India, and adapt our intervention for our next pilot phase, which will formally assess intervention feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary efficacy.MethodsOur intervention prototype was designed to deliver culturally tailored educational programming via a provider-moderated, voice- and text-based group approach to connect new mothers with a social support group of other new mothers, increase their health-related communication with providers, and refer them to care needed. We targeted deployment using feature phones to include participants from diverse socioeconomic groups. We held moderated group calls weekly, disseminated educational audios, and created SMS text messaging groups. We varied content delivery, group discussion participation, and chat moderation. Three groups of postpartum women from Punjab were recruited for the pilot through community health workers. Sociodemographic data were collected at baseline. Intervention feasibility and acceptability were assessed through weekly participant check-ins (N=29), weekly moderator reports, structured end-line in-depth interviews among a subgroup of participants (15/29, 52%), and back-end technology data.ResultsThe participants were aged 24 to 28 years and 1 to 3 months postpartum. Of the 29 participants, 17 (59%) had their own phones. Half of the participants (14/29, 48%) attended ≥3 of the 6 calls; the main barriers were childcare and household responsibilities and network or phone issues. Most participants were very satisfied with the intervention (16/19, 84%) and found the educational content (20/20, 100%) and group discussions (17/20, 85%) very useful. The participants used the SMS text messaging chat, particularly when facilitator-moderated. Sustaining participation and fostering group interactions was limited by technological and sociocultural challenges.ConclusionsThe intervention was considered generally feasible and acceptable, and protocol adjustments were identified to improve intervention delivery and engagement. To address technological issues, we engaged a cloud-based service provider for group calls and an interactive voice response service provider for educational recordings and developed a smartphone app for the participants. We seek to overcome sociocultural challenges through new strategies for increasing group engagement, including targeting midlevel female community health care providers as moderators. Our second pilot will assess intervention feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary effectiveness at 6 months. Ultimately, we seek to support the health and well-being of postpartum women and their infants in South Asia and beyond through the development of efficient, acceptable, and effective intervention strategies.

Inherent Security-aware Resource Utilizing Methodology for Cloud Environments

Cloud-based environments utilize a different kind of security services on the Internet in a cost effective manner. The cloud-based service providers may diminish the cost for the operational purpose by the methodology of automatic controlling of the resource utilization with the user’s demand. Moreover, the time and expenditure may expand and the amount of active utilization of computational resources is one of the high restrictions of the scalability measurement. The automatic controlling and utilization of resources are the biggest confront in a cloud computing environment. This paper proposed a solution for providing the automatic scalability of the limited resources for the multi-layered cloud applications. The Google penalty payment methodology was utilized to synchronize the expenditure for the penalty related issues and to correctly compute the actual profit. A hybrid resource utilization algorithm is used to find the valid resources in the cloud layer with a security-aware algorithm are utilized to distribute the resources to the active users based on their request. The experimental results are performed using CLOUDSIM that indicates the advancements of the proposed methodology in terms of resource utilization, providing security and profit identification.

The Right not to Forget: Cloud Based Services Moratoriums in War Zones and Data Portability Rights

Various technologies have joined forces in recent years to outsource human memory. Digital cameras, now an essential feature of cellular devices, allows individuals to document every aspect of their lives; Cloud based services allows them to store and backup such data remotely, and to use it on many online platforms. The data stored in the cloud, of course, also contains copies of valuable personal documents one accumulates during a lifetime: personal correspondence, work related files, copies of high school and university diplomas, scans of contracts and titles, and much more. Online services enable us also to develop a digital persona through which fosters alternative ways of social relations, which are at times liberated from constraints of distances or language barriers. Individuals may spend long years cultivating their digital personae and their online communities which in turn reward them with reputational and symbolic capital, as well as emotional support. However, the globally available online services facilitating both digital personae and cloud-based storage of highly valuable personal data are provided by private, non-state actors, whose business model may develop over time in manners unexpected to their users. Reviewing the Terms of Service of common cloud-based services shows that most service providers reserve the right to purge accounts which were inactive for prolonged periods, or partially delete data related to premium services when users default on their periodical payment. Flexible business models monetizing on the captive audience of online services may be deemed acceptable in peaceful times, when habitual users can respond promptly to changes adversely affecting their online persona and data by preemptively relocating their personal data or backing it up. Although in recent years some internet memes jokingly added ‘Wifi’ and ‘Battery life’ as the new basis of Maslow’s hierarchal pyramid of human needs, those will be of less concern to individuals undergoing humanitarian crisis, struggling for survival, medical care and sustenance. Humanitarian calamities may also halt automatic payments to services providers, with the collapse of local financial infrastructure on top of the potential reallocation of individual resources to provide for more immediate needs. Once the dust settles, refugees and survivors may wish to regain access to their online accounts, which may at time contain their only memories of perished loved ones, and the only ways to contact family members and friends presumed lost in the fog of war, as well as provide access to important medical, academic, professional and other irreplaceable personal documents that might be of importance to refuges striving to establish themselves in a foreign country. While under regular circumstances, such accounts – either inactive or defaulting on their periodical fees to their providers – are treated by service providers subject to changing boilerplate terms of service and fluctuating business models, during humanitarian crisis individuals are unable to promptly respond to online warnings and to timely realize their data portability rights. They are in risk of having their retained memories – at times, all that left from their former, pre-calamity lives – deleted. This chapter aims to illustrate this problem, and offers an outline for a possible solution by establishing a moratorium mechanism under which cloud-based service providers will refrain from any deletion of data or purging of personal accounts or users that may be affected by the event. Their data will be retained for a sufficiently long period, that will allow survivors access to their personal accounts and data. Accordingly, defining the geographical domain of the moratorium could evolve as the event progresses The precariousness of refugees, displaced persons and survivors of humanitarian disasters emphasizes the importance of the right not to forget, as conceptualized in this chapter. While cloud storage renders the trope of rescuing the family photo album from a burning house obsolete, without a mechanism ensuring that its digital successor remains stored in the cloud, our memory – and a part of ourselves – will fade away.

“CloudStation:” A Cloud-Based Ground Control Station for Drones

This article demonstrates an open source cloud-based ground control station that allows remote piloting of drones (aerial-, land-, or sea-based vehicle) from anywhere in the world with just a Web browser. A standard client–server architecture is used for pilot–server and drone–server communication and it is designed to be scalable for the control of millions of drones simultaneously. CloudStation, a proof of concept Web app, is built with Django and hosted on a cloud-based service provider with global availability and scalability. A demonstration from two antipode points (separated around the world) shows the cloud-based command and control of a remote rover.

Data center growth in the United States: decoupling the demand for services from electricity use

Data centers are energy intensive buildings that have grown in size and number to meet the increasing demands of a digital economy. This paper presents a bottom-up model to estimate data center electricity demand in the United States over a 20 year period and examines observed and projected electricity use trends in the context of changing data center operations. Results indicate a rapidly increasing electricity demand at the turn of the century that has significantly subsided to a nearly steady annual electricity use of about 70 billion kWh in recent years. While data center workloads continue to grow exponentially, comparable increases in electricity demand have been avoided through the adoption of key energy efficiency measures and a shift towards large cloud-based service providers. Alternative projections from the model illustrate the wide range in potential electricity that could be consumed to support data centers, with the US data center workload demand estimated for 2020 requiring a total electricity use that varies by about 135 billion kWh, depending on the adoption rate of efficiency measures during this decade. While recent improvements in data center energy efficiency have been a success, the growth of data center electricity use beyond 2020 is uncertain, as modeled trends indicate that the efficiency measures of the past may not be enough for the data center workloads of the future. The results show that successful stabilization of data center electricity will require new innovations in data center efficiency to further decouple electricity demand from the ever-growing demand for data center services.

A Two-Factor Authorization Approach for Increasing the Resiliency of IoT-Based Autonomous Consumer-Oriented Systems

We heighten the resiliency of a subset of Internet of Things (IoT) consumer-oriented autonomous systems that depend on cloud-based service providers for their operation and can adversely affect the operation of critical resources such as electricity providers. We accomplish such through introducing an operational authority (OA) to the current architecture, thus providing real-time two-factor authorization to requests that a service provider puts upon an IoT system allegedly on behalf of a ubiquitous user. In order to demonstrate the need of the new player, we utilize a control system model to illustrate the impacts that incidents could bring to the current architecture and resource providers. We further suggest a high-level general protocol in order to demonstrate the operation of the new architecture; we determine that the overhead introduced by the OA is minimal. Our main contribution, the establishment of the new entity, is based on three key assumptions. First, it is impossible to guarantee that service providers will always act in the best interest of the user. Second, there exist potential jurisdictional issues in allowing an entity in one jurisdiction be the sole controller of physical infrastructure of another jurisdiction. And third, the operation of IoT-based infrastructure seeks to be autonomous through minimizing frequent user intervention for its operations. The proposed architecture introduces various topics that cannot be duly dealt within a single article due to their depth and breadth. Thus, we suggest important subjects of research that are relevant at early stages of the IoT paradigm upon which current and future developments rest.

Hypothesis Test for Low-rate DDoS Attack Detection in Cloud Computing Environment

Low-rate Distributed Denial of Service (LDoS) attack is another form of DDoS attack for disrupting the cloud services. It differs from DDoS attack in terms of attack volume. DDoS attacks usually have very high attack volume; however, LDoS have very low attack rate. Moreover, these attacks are launched periodically with high narrow spike and low frequency. The behavior of the LDoS attack traffic is very much close to the behavior of the normal traffic; therefore LDoS attacks are capable to bypass the DDoS detection system. Therefore, low-rate DDoS attacks can persist for longer time and endanger the victim. LDoS attacks fraudulently consume the cloud resources for prolonged period of time which raises the economic concerns of cloud-based service providers. This paper presents an effective approach to detect the presence of LDoS attack flow in cloud computing. The proposed approach perform hypothesis test based on t-statistic to identify the LDoS attack flows. To verify the claims made in the paper and to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, several experiments are done with the help of suitable benchmark datasets.

A Survey of Network Isolation Solutions for Multi-Tenant Data Centers

The infrastructure-as-a-service model is one of the fastest growing opportunities for cloud-based service providers. It provides an environment that reduces operating and capital expenses while increasing agility and reliability of critical information systems. In this multitenancy environment, cloud-based service providers are challenged with providing a secure isolation service combining different vertical segments, such as financial or public services, while nevertheless meeting industry standards and legal compliance requirements within their data centers. In order to achieve this, new solutions are being designed and proposed to provide traffic isolation for a large numbers of tenants and their resulting traffic volumes. This survey highlights key challenges that cloud-based service providers might encounter while providing multitenant environments. It also succinctly describes some key solutions for providing simultaneous tenant and network isolation, as well as highlights their respective advantages and disadvantages. We begin with generic routing encapsulation introduced in 1994 in “RFC 1701,” and will conclude with today’s latest solutions. We detail 15 of the newest architectures and then compare their complexities, the overhead they induce, their VM migration abilities, their resilience, their scalability, and their multidata center capacities. This paper is intended for, but not limited to, cloud-based service providers who want to deploy the most appropriate isolation solution for their needs, taking into consideration their existing network infrastructure. This survey provides details and comparisons of various proposals while also highlighting possible guidelines for future research on issues pertaining to the design of new network isolation architectures.

Mechanisms for SLA provisioning in cloud-based service providers

A challenge in cloud resource management is to design self-adaptable solutions capable to react to unpredictable workload fluctuations and changing utility principles. This paper analyzes the problem from the perspective of an Application Service Provider (ASP) that uses a cloud infrastructure to achieve scalable provisioning of its services in the respect of QoS constraints.First we draw a taxonomy of IaaS provider and use the identified features to drive the design of four autonomic service management architectures differing on the degree of control an ASP have on the system. We implemented two of this solutions and related mechanism to test five different resource provisioning policies. The implemented testbed has been evaluated under a realistic workload based on Wikipedia access traces on Amazon EC2 platform.The experimental evaluation performed confirms that: the proposed policies are capable to properly dimension the system resources making the whole system self-adaptable respect to the workload fluctuation. Moreover, having full control over the resource management plan allow to save up to the 32% of resource allocation cost always in the respect of SLA constraints.