Cloud Computing Solutions Research Articles

Conceptualizing a Secure Wireless Cloud

The interest in cloud computing by organizations has driven a core desire to become more effective and efficient with information technology (IT). Cloud computing enables organizations to utilize instantly provisioned scalable IT resources on a pay-per-use basis. The wireless grid provides a new model for heterogeneous devices to share physical and virtual resources within an ad-hoc environment with no dedicated server needed to manage the network. Both of these technologies provide new opportunities to provide innovative architectures but also have a number of security related issues that concern many potential users. Despite the potential benefits, each integration of a cloud computing and a wireless grid architecture raise even more concerns related to information security than each architecture alone. As a new paradigm for organizational strategic initiatives, these are the issues which prevent cloud computing and wireless grid solutions from becoming the prevalent integration for an operational system. This article will identify a wireless cloud architecture and identify potential vulnerabilities and threats to a wireless cloud solution. We also identify the beginnings of a promising wireless grid security architecture, which focuses on a wireless cloud authentication, authorization and access control process.

Self-management of cloud applications and infrastructure for energy optimization

As a direct consequence of the increasing popularity of Cloud Computing solutions, data centers are amazingly growing and hence have to urgently face with the energy consumption issue. Available solutions rely on Cloud Computing models and virtualization techniques to scale up/down application based on their performance metrics. Although those proposals can reduce the energy footprint of applications and by transitivity of cloud infrastructures, they do not consider the internal characteristics of applications to finely define a trade-off between applications Quality of Service and energy footprint. In this paper, we propose a self-adaptation approach that considers both application internals and system to reduce the energy footprint in cloud infrastructure. Each application and the infrastructure are equipped with their own control loop, which allows them to autonomously optimize their executions. Simulations show that the approach may lead to appreciable energy savings without interfering on application provider revenues.

A Survey on Database Performance in Virtualized Cloud Environments

Cloud Computing emerged as a major paradigm over the years. Major challenges it poses to computer science are related to latency, scale, and reliability issues. It leverages strong economical aspects and provides sound answers to questions like energy consumption, high availability, elasticity, or efficient computing resource utilization. Many Cloud Computing platform and solution providers resort to virtualization as key underlying technology. Properties like isolation, multi-virtual machine parallelism, load balancing, efficient resource utilization, and dynamic pre-allocation besides economic factors make it attractive. It not only legitimates the spread of several types of data stores supporting a variety of data modes, but also inherently requires different types of load: (i) analytical; (ii) Transactional/Update-intensive; and (iii) mixed real-time feed processing. The authors survey how database systems can best leverage virtualization properties in cloud scenarios. The authors show that read mostly database systems and especially column stores profit from virtualization in analytical and search scenarios. Secondly, cloud analytics virtualized database systems are efficient in transactional scenarios such as Cloud CRM virtualized database systems lag. The authors also explore how the nature of mixed cloud loads can be best reflected by virtualization properties like load balancing, migration, and high availability.

Next-generation optical access networks: Dynamic bandwidth allocation, resource use optimization, and QoS improvements [Guest Eeditorial

Rapidly increasing traffic demands of current residential and business applications and newly evolving services require access network solutions that can offer dramatically higher bandwidth. New applications tend to be media-rich such as high-definition television (HDTV), video on demand (VoD), voice over IP (VoIP), and high-speed Internet. Emerging applications include multimedia conferencing, multiplayer online gaming, online content generation, and consumer-oriented cloudcomputing solutions, and are even more demanding and bandwidth-hungry. As a result, future wireline access networks will be faced with the challenge of transporting the ever increasing volume of data-centric traffic with ever tighter timing and quality of service (QoS) requirements. The seven articles in this special issue focus on next generation optical network communications and networking.

A quantitative analysis of current security concerns and solutions for cloud computing

The development of cloud computing services is speeding up the rate in which the organizations outsource their computational services or sell their idle computational resources. Even though migrating to the cloud remains a tempting trend from a financial perspective, there are several other aspects that must be taken into account by companies before they decide to do so. One of the most important aspect refers to security: while some cloud computing security issues are inherited from the solutions adopted to create such services, many new security questions that are particular to these solutions also arise, including those related to how the services are organized and which kind of service/data can be placed in the cloud. Aiming to give a better understanding of this complex scenario, in this article we identify and classify the main security concerns and solutions in cloud computing, and propose a taxonomy of security in cloud computing, giving an overview of the current status of security in this emerging technology.

SOA adoption in higher education: a practical guide to service- oriented virtual learning environment

The adoption of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) in higher education helps solve the adaptability problems by reducing the complexity of integration of new systems, by reusing services, and increasing the agility. Even more, using shared services and Cloud Computing solutions helps universities to create a collaborative and open environment, with low costs and efficient service management. This paper proposes a SOA adoption solution for universities with the aim of creating an environment where learners access more easily the digital information in order to support their lifelong education and career goals. Also, the paper analyses the integration of education systems and standards with SOA, as well as the creation of new educational environments. The solution helps understand the way universities can solve the complex and growing demands of the educational system with reduces investments.

Risk Assessment for Cloud-Based IT Systems

The use of Cloud Computing services is an attractive option to improve IT systems to achieve rapidly and elastically provisioned capability, and also to offer economic benefits. However, companies see security as a major concern in migrating to the Cloud. To bring clarity in Cloud security, this paper presents a systematic approach to manage the risks and analyzes the full range of risk in Cloud Computing solutions. Furthermore, as a study case, Google App Engine Platform is assessed based on ISO/IEC 27002 and OWASP Top 10 Risk List in this paper. Knowing the risks of Cloud solutions, companies can execute well-informed decisions on going into the Cloud and build their Cloud solutions in a secure way, relying on a robust e-trust relationship.

My way: Interview with Martin King and Phil Morris

Chester Zoo is one of the UK's leading species conservation centres, and a major visitor attraction. This paper discussed about Chester Zoo that must have it's fair share of spammers. IT department were running McAfee anti-spam at one time, which cut out the blatant spam. However, the more sophisticated spammers use certain keywords to get around filters, and they were still getting through. IT department have quite restricted bandwidth, and thought it would be better to not ever see the spam mail. A Cloud Computing solution was therefore a good thing, as it kept mail completely off our network. The department use the bandwidth to host the website too, so the more spam we have to sift through, the slower our website.