Hybrid IT Research Articles

ХМАРНІ РІШЕННЯ РЕАЛІЗАЦІЇ ГІБРИДНОЇ IT-ІНФРАСТРУКТУРИ ІНФОРМАЦІЙНО-ОСВІТНЬОГО СЕРЕДОВИЩА ВИЩОГО ВІЙСЬКОВОГО НАВЧАЛЬНОГО ЗАКЛАДУ

According to the cloud-based project, the information and education environment (IE) of a higher military educational institution is being modernized. Hybrid IT infrastructure and cloud solutions for its implementation are analyzed. As a result, a comprehensive model of dialogically close service solutions is presented as a prototype of an open, coordinated and standardized cloud system. The hierarchical two-level structure of the complex model is represented by: at the lower (physical) level, hardware for providing cloud services; at the upper (abstract) level, physically deployed software. The article presents a combined scheme of corporate IT infrastructure maintenance with priority given to the IaaS services segment, the classic scenario of hybrid IT infrastructure deployment, and a ready-made management software solution. These requirements have been transformed into a cloud-based hybrid system architecture that combines the external infrastructure of service providers with the internal local infrastructure of a military educational institution by integrating corporate resources and services into the information and educational environment. The latter are represented by ready-made solutions from Microsoft Azure, Office 365, Imagine Academy, Virtual Academy, and Google Workspace, which Microsoft and Google provide to educational institutions free of charge. The basic version of the freely distributed cloud platform Apache CloudStack v.4 was chosen as a tool for managing the resources of the hybrid IT infrastructure. In this context, the selection criteria and the overall topological ordering of the cloud platform are defined. The organizational emphasis of the platform implementation as a three-level hierarchical investment of structural elements is set. We propose a technical structure of the implementation consisting of two computers, one of which performs the functions of the CloudStack MS Management Server and the Primary Storage, and the other is responsible for the hypervisor and contains the Secondary Storage. Keywords: information and educational environment, hybrid IT infrastructure, virtualization, service solutions, cloud platform, virtual machine, deployment model.

Context-aware incremental clustering of alerts in monitoring systems

The highly complex nature of today’s modern hybrid IT applications continues to present an increasing challenge for operation teams relying on traditional monitoring approaches. In monitoring systems, incidents occur frequently due to a variety of causes, from updates to software and hardware, to changes in operation environment. These incidents could significantly degrade the system’s availability and customers’ satisfaction. In many cases, investigating an incident in such an environment could feel like looking for a needle in a haystack - and you may not even know how the needle looks like until you see it. In that regard, one of the main challenges is how to efficiently analyze multiple sets of alert messages stemming from disparate monitoring tools and collectors across the application stack, in real-time. Such an analysis can provide trustworthy detection of system states at various critical points, thus helping teams to detect, frame, analyze and resolve incidents or failures in a relatively short time, especially if an accurate system’s topological dependencies are absent. In this work, we suggest a new approach to determining relations among alerts – forming “events”. The suggested approach directly models the event’s likelihood, by first embedding alerts’ corresponding metrics into a common latent space where the distance among metrics can be naturally defined, using a word2vec model, and then cluster alerts by employing a tailored incremental clustering algorithm. The suggested approach allows controlling the trade-off between the model’s sensitivity to clusters’ noise-robustness, thus spanning a wide range of clustering mechanisms, as well as adapting clusters’ outcomes to the level and properties of the noise expected in input data.

Probabilistic Inference Hybrid IT Value Model Using Bayesian Network

In this study, we propose probabilistic inference model on a hybrid IT value model using Bayesian Network (BN) that represents uncertain relationships between 13 variables of the model. Those variables are performance, market, innovation, IT support, core competence, capabilities, knowledge, human resources, IT development, IT resources, capital, labor, and IT spending. The relationships between variables in the model are determined using probabilistic approach, including the structure, nature, and direction of relationships. We derive a probabilistic graphical model and measure the relationships between variables. The results of this study shows that the probabilistic approach with Bayesian Network can show that capabilities and core competence are the most important variables to produce high performance output.

Hybrid IT and Multi Cloud an Emerging Trend and Improved Performance in Cloud Computing

In the present day scenario cloud computing is an attractive subject for IT and non IT personnel. It is a service-oriented pay per use computational model. Cloud has working models with service-oriented delivery mechanism as well as deployment-oriented infrastructure mechanism. Data centers are the backbone of cloud computing. The massive participation of public has also increased the load on the cloud servers. Proper scheduling of resources is always needed. Quality of service is to be provided as per the service level agreement. Virtualization technique is the main reason behind the huge success of cloud. Multi-cloud exchanges to optimize connectivity today, multi-cloud exchanges offer the next level in direct connectivity, allowing organizations to safely and easily expand multi-cloud capabilities. Exchanges eliminate the added worries that an open Internet can bring as well as the tedious provisioning and configuring that comes with connecting to the public Internet. Importantly, multi-cloud exchanges allow organizations to establish a single connection to multiple cloud providers at the same time through an Ethernet switching platform, rather than wrestling with multiple individual connections to cloud providers.

A hybrid IT framework for identifying high-quality physicians using big data analytics

Patients face difficulties identifying appropriate doctors owing to the sizeable quantity and uneven quality of information in online healthcare communities. In studying physician searches, researchers often focus on expertise similarity matches and sentiment analyses of reviews. However, the quality is often ignored. To address patients' information needs holistically, we propose a four-dimensional IT framework based on signaling theory. The model takes expertise knowledge, online reviews, profile descriptions (e.g., hospital reputation, number of patients, city) and service quality (e.g., response speed, interaction frequency, cost) as signals that distinguish high-quality physicians. It uses machine learning approaches to derive similarity matches and sentiment analysis. It also measures the relative importance of the signals by multi-criterion analysis and derives the physician rankings through the aggregated scores. Our study revealed that the proposed approach performs better compared with the other two recommend techniques. This research expands the boundary of signaling theory to healthcare management and enriches the literature on IT use and inter-organizational systems. The proposed IT model may improve patient care, alleviate the physician-patient relationship and reduce lawsuits against hospitals; it also has practical implications for healthcare management.

Hybrid IT architecture by gene-based cryptomata (HITAGC) for lightweight security services

In the computing world, the digital transformation of data grows exponentially with every year. However, these situations are predominantly tackled by leading enterprises through by adopting a hybrid IT model. This model effectively supports the organization through strategic design to provide standard delivery to customers from independent multi-sourced entities. An experimental design method is applied using hybrid IT architecture with gene-based cryptomata (HITAGC) which is well suited to real-time cloud environments to store and retrieve the cloud space data efficiently. The CSC primarily relies on the service of CSP to keep their confidential data, and this system ultimately uses the PKC crypts. To address this security demand, we propose two different schemes such as HITAGC-PKC and hybrid HITAGC. The first model is designed to generate robust asymmetric keys for the Internet of Things, and the other hybrid HITAGC is for efficient sharing of big data over the cloud in a secure manner. The performance of these crypts is compared with the traditional systems like standard RSA, ESRKGS, SED2, EDCon, and AES.

How a zero trust approach can help to secure your AWS environment

Today's organisations are increasingly turning to cloud computing providers to offer them the scalability and IT agility necessary to fuel a fast-moving digital and app-based business. In reality, this means operating complex hybrid IT environments featuring public cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platforms from providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). Yet the notion of shared responsibility is still misunderstood by some, leading to potentially fatal cyber-security gaps. To help ensure maximum protection for your data, systems and users, you need to take an identity-centric, ‘zero trust’ approach. Today's organisations are increasingly turning to cloud computing providers to offer them the scalability and IT agility necessary to fuel a fast-moving digital and app-based business. In reality, this means operating complex hybrid IT environments featuring public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platforms. Yet the notion of shared responsibility is still misunderstood by some, leading to potentially fatal cyber-security gaps. To help ensure maximum protection for your data, systems and users, you need to take an identity-centric, ‘zero trust’ approach, argues Barry Scott of Centrify.

Integrating on-premises data with customer relationship management application on cloud: A hybrid IT infrastructure support service

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a group of data-driven, integrated solution that enhances how an organization interacts and does business with the customers. University support service centres provide hone support for the university stakeholders’ queries and requests related to academic information. The support centre uses retrieval of information from huge text documents, records, and log files from disparate data sources residing on on-premises. Handling data has become a critical task and moving all the data to the cloud is not feasible. The objective of designed hybrid solution is to serve a resolving customer service request and a scalable solution to a large set of data for the organizations concerned with security, efficiency, and to use the advantages of the cloud service. In the proposed hybrid solution, the data resides on the on-premises is connected to the customer relationship management application deployed on the cloud, this reduces the IT infrastructure tasks at a university support service. We describe the system’s architecture and the technical challenges we have faced. The CRM application is deployed on Microsoft Azure cloud test instance and the Azure service bus relay is used to connect the on-premises data.

Challenges and Directions in Service Management Automation

Research teams and IT service providers are continuously increasing the degree of Automation in Hybrid IT environments spanning multi-provider Clouds as well as traditional IT. Automation and Cognitive Systems are widely regarded as the foundation for improving the productivity as well as the quality of Service Delivery. At the same time, Hybrid IT deployments are being subject to a variety of challenges in large deployments on a global scale. Based on our experience of running a service practice that delivers IT Service Management in Hybrid IT environments to customers worldwide, this paper will review the challenges and directions in implementing Integrated Network, Systems and Service Management technologies and point out gaps encountered in current tools and implementations. This is fueled by the desire of Service Providers to evolve Automation from a development activity to an approach focusing on recording and storing the practices of the best system administrators and further on to a cognitive activity where the management system learns over time which actions need to be undertaken under a given set of circumstances. By means of real-life examples, we identify candidate concepts and technologies that will help us build the next generation of Integrated Network, Systems and Service Management.

Loom: Complex large-scale visual insight for large hybrid IT infrastructure management

Interactive visual exploration techniques (IVET) such as those advocated by Shneiderman and extreme scale visual analytics have successfully increased our understanding of a variety of domains that produce huge amounts of complex data. In spite of their complexity, IT infrastructures have not benefited from the application of IVET techniques.Loom is inspired in IVET techniques and builds on them to tame increasing complexity in IT infrastructure management systems guaranteeing interactive response times and integrating key elements for IT management: Relationships between managed entities coming from different IT management subsystems, alerts and actions (or reconfigurations) of the IT setup. The Loom system builds on two main pillars: (1) a multiplex graph spanning data from different ITIMs; and (2) a novel visualisation arrangement: the Loom “Thread” visualisation model.We have tested this in a number of real-world applications, showing that Loom can handle million of entities without losing information, with minimum context switching, and offering better performance than other relational/graph-based systems. This ensures interactive response times (few seconds as 90th percentile). The value of the “Thread” visualisation model is shown in a qualitative analysis of users’ experiences with Loom.

The hybrid IT project manager: One foot each in the IT and business domains

As firms rely on advancing technologies to meet the demands of complex business processes, there is an increasing need for IT project managers (PMs) to resolve paradoxical tensions that accompany uncertainties. Paradoxical tensions exist because IT project knowledge has assumed a clear separation and borderline between business and IT. There is an increased pressure on PMs to resolve paradoxical tensions arising from short-term efficiency/goals versus longer-term flexibility/success. A field survey of 108 IT projects suggests that a shift in the required knowledge set of PMs is needed as their role expands to include greater responsibility and knowledge base – a hybrid PM with one foot in the IT domain and the other foot in the business domain – to deal with a diversity of paradoxes and contradictory demands associated with business and technical uncertainties. Shifting the focus of business knowledge towards PMs is likely to increase the chance of project success.

Virtual Identity Approaches Evaluation for Anonymous Communication in Cloud Environments

Since the era’s of Cloud computing beginning, the Identity Management is considered as a permanent challenge especially for the hybrid IT environments that permit for many users’ applications to share the same data center depending on servers’ virtualization. This paper introduces a complete study about Identity forms in different domains and applications. Also, a performance evaluation of new approaches for Virtual Identity was done. Actually, Virtual Identity, a new terminology used in virtual environments, was introduced to enhance the anonymous communication in such types of complex networks. Based on the work analysis and motivations done through an online survey, two techniques were used to implement the Virtual Identity; Identity Based Encryption (IBE) and Pseudonym Based Encryption (PBE). Both techniques were validated using MIRACL library for security algorithms. In addition, the performance of both approaches was evaluated under different configurations and network conditions through OPNET Modeler. The results showed the impact of the number of cloud users and their locations (either local or remote) on the application response time in cloud environments using the proposed virtual identities. Moreover, Application Characterization Environment whiteboard was used to simulate the overall flow of data across different tiers from start to end of the application task for Virtual Identity creation. The results and outcomes for both methodologies showed that they are suitable paradigm for achieving high degree of security and efficiency in such sophisticated network access to many online services and applications.

하이브리드 IT신제품의 범주화에 따른 보완재 번들링의 효과성에 관한 연구

하이브리드 IT신제품의 범주화에 따른 보완재 번들링의 효과성에 관한 연구

Auditing Hybrid IT Environments

This paper presents a personal approach of auditing the hybrid IT environments consisting in both on premise and on demand services and systems. The analysis is performed from both safety and profitability perspectives and it aims to offer to strategy, technical and business teams a representation of the value added by the cloud programme within the company’s portfolio. Starting from the importance of the IT Governance in the actual business environments, we presented in the first section the main principles that drive the technology strategy in order to maximize the value added by IT assets in the business products. Section two summarizes the frameworks leveraged by our approach in order to implement the safety and profitability computation algorithms described in the third section. The paper concludes with benefits of our personal frameworks and presents the future developments.

2013 Trends and Strategies

This article examines the key technology trends and strategies facing CIOs for 2013, including mobility & BYOD, the personal cloud (BYOC), mobile apps (HTML5), Big Data, social media, corporate app stores, in-memory computing, actionable analytics, hybrid IT (the public cloud), and video and voice telepresence.

EMC Corporation: Managing IT M&A Integrations to Enable Profitable Growth by Acquisitions

EMC Corporation is one of the fastest profitably growing public companies in the United States. It pursues both organic and acquisitive growth. Between 2005 and 2010, it acquired over 50 companies. EMC used to be a vendor entirely of enterprise storage products. Complementary products and technologies of the acquired companies enabled EMC to transform itself into a vendor offering complete systems of hardware and software solutions for addressing information infrastructure needs of customers. EMC’s acquisition strategy has been to retain the specialization and talent of acquired companies, and accelerate their revenue growth. Consistent with this strategy, EMC has followed a case-by-case approach in integrating IT infrastructures and applications of acquired companies. Depending on the strategic intent of an acquisition, EMC has left the IT of the acquired company alone; integrated it fully with that of EMC; or followed a hybrid IT integration approach. This case bycase IT M&A integration approach has been pivotal in EMC’s profitable growth through acquisitions. As of early 2011, EMC was facing an unprecedented profitable growth opportunity. However, as the company’s size and scope of products and operations grew, different levels of IT integration across various acquired businesses and product lines started to create some challenges. Business and IT leaders were contemplating how to address these challenges and how to architect the company to seize the profitable growth opportunities ahead. This case study examines how EMC has organized for and governed M&A integrations with a particular focus on IT M&A integrations.

Business-driven short-term management of a hybrid IT infrastructure

We consider the problem of managing a hybrid computing infrastructure whose processing elements are comprised of in-house dedicated machines, virtual machines acquired on-demand from a cloud computing provider through short-term reservation contracts, and virtual machines made available by the remote peers of a best-effort peer-to-peer (P2P) grid. Each of these resources has different cost basis and associated quality of service guarantees. The applications that run in this hybrid infrastructure are characterized by a utility function: the utility gained with the completion of an application depends on the time taken to execute it. We take a business-driven approach to manage this infrastructure, aiming at maximizing the profit yielded, that is, the utility produced as a result of the applications that are run minus the cost of the computing resources that are used to run them. We propose a heuristic to be used by a contract planner agent that establishes the contracts with the cloud computing provider to balance the cost of running an application and the utility that is obtained with its execution, with the goal of producing a high overall profit. Our analytical results show that the simple heuristic proposed achieves very high relative efficiency in the use of the hybrid infrastructure. We also demonstrate that the ability to estimate the grid behaviour is an important condition for making contracts that allow such relative efficiency values to be achieved. On the other hand, our simulation results with realistic error predictions show only a modest improvement in the profit achieved by the simple heuristic proposed, when compared to a heuristic that does not consider the grid when planning contracts, but uses it, and another that is completely oblivious to the existence of the grid. This calls for the development of more accurate predictors for the availability of P2P grids, and more elaborated heuristics that can better deal with the several sources of non-determinism present in this hybrid infrastructure.