Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1. INTRODUCTION..5
.
2. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY...6
4. HISTORY......................................................................................................................................13
5. POLITICAL ISSUES..................................................................................................................14
6. LEGAL ISSUES..14
7. ARCHITECTURE..15
8. COMPONENTS..16
9. STANDARDS...19
11. TYPES.22
15. COMPANIES.29
18. BENEFITS38
20. DISCUSSIONS..41
23. CONCLUSION.62
24. REFERENCES.64
1. Introduction
Imagine yourself in the world where the users of the computer of todays internet world dont
have to run, install or store their application or data on their own computers, imagine the
world where every piece of your information or data would reside on the Cloud (Internet).
As a metaphor for the Internet, "the cloud" is a familiar clich, but when combined
with "computing", the meaning gets bigger and fuzzier. Some analysts and vendors define
cloud computing narrowly as an updated version of utility computing: basically virtual
servers available over the Internet. Others go very broad, arguing anything you consume
outside the firewall is "in the cloud", including conventional outsourcing.
Cloud computing comes into focus only when you think about what we always need: a
way to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure,
training new personnel, or licensing new software. Cloud computing encompasses any
subscription-based or pay-per-use service that, in real time over the Internet, extends ICT's
existing capabilities.
Cloud computing is at an early stage, with a motley crew of providers large and small
delivering a slew of cloud-based services, from full-blown applications to storage services to
spam filtering. Yes, utility-style infrastructure providers are part of the mix, but so are SaaS
(software as a service) providers such as Salesforce.com. Today, for the most part, IT must
plug into cloud-based services individually, but cloud computing aggregators and integrators
are already emerging.
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2. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
There are two main data sources for the research study- secondary and primary. To collect the
data for this research study, both primary and secondary sources were used. One of the
cardinal rules in data collection is to exhaust all secondary data sources before conducting a
primary study. The operational features of secondary data are that it already exists and is
easily available. Secondary data can be quite versatile and is used for many purposes. To
collect secondary data, at first, the researcher reviewed articles related to research objectives
that appeared in the literature. Key journals and proceedings were systematically scanned for
any articles related to the research topic. In addition to that, search for the key words in peer
reviewed journals were undertaken. This search led to articles in other related journals. To
conduct an empirical investigation, a survey was conducted, using a questionnaire. At first,
the items to be included in the questionnaire were decided. Next, the survey was conducted to
collect the data and then analysed and interpreted to find the answers to the research
objectives. The survey for data collection was carried out in the month of Dec - Mar of 2012.
The questionnaire was developed based on literature, deriving issues pertinent to the research
objectives. The questionnaire was pre-tested in a pilot study to fine the questionnaire. The
pilot study was conducted among a convenience sample of four people consisting of
colleagues and industry guide, to evaluate how well the questionnaire was framed and
understood. Based on the pilot study and feedback from the participants, some items were
reworded to improve clarity.
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LIMITATIONS:
Sample size was small because it was quiet difficult to reach highly professionals
technocrats for the survey on this sensitive topic of Cloud Computing.
Findings of this study indicate that the study is quite informative and useful for both
general public and companies indulge in cloud technology. They can understand the
dimensions reflecting benefits and risk of cloud computing and impact of all these
factors on an enterprise.
Findings of this study also indicate that it is worthwhile for an enterprise to take note
of the results of this study before going for actual implementation of cloud computing
technology.
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3. Cloud computing- The Concept
Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared
pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and
services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or
service provider interaction. - U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
Cloud computing means using number of computer servers through a network, which appears
as they are one single coherent computer. Cloud computing in recent times is one of the
fastest emerging technology trend. The goal behind opting for Cloud computing is to save
huge costs on building IT infrastructure. This papers elaborates the evolution of Cloud
computing and how the cloud computing has been adopted by various enterprises. Cloud
computing has been adopted in almost all the enterprise in todays world. This paper also
explores on the technical description of the Cloud computing and its effect on Enterprise in
terms of Cost & Security.
Cloud computing can also be referred to as the practice of using a network of remote servers
hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or
personal computer.
As per a Forrester Report (Dec 2008) more than 70% of IT budget is spent on maintenance of
current IT infrastructure instead of adding new one. In order to better utilize the IT budget
companies are opting for cloud computing.
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Cloud computing differs from the client-server model by providing services from a
server that are executed and managed by a client's web browser, with no installed
client version of an application required. Centralization gives cloud service providers
full control on the versions of the browser-based applications provided to clients, which
removes the continuous need for version upgrades or manages individual licenses of client
computing devices.
The concept incorporates infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and
software as a service (SaaS) as well as Web 2.0 and other recent technology trends which
have the common theme of reliance on the Internet for satisfying the computing needs of the
users. Examples of SaaS vendors include Salesforce.com and Google Apps which provide
common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, while the
software and data are stored on the servers.
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3.1 Comparison:
Cloud computing is often confused with grid computing ("a form of distributed computing
whereby a 'super and virtual computer' is composed of a cluster of networked, loosely-
coupled computers, acting in concert to perform very large tasks"), utility computing (the
"packaging of computing resources, such as computation and storage, as a metered service
similar to a traditional public utility such as electricity") and autonomic computing
("computer systems capable of self-management").
Indeed many cloud computing deployments as of 2009 depend on grids, have autonomic
characteristics and bill like utilities but cloud computing can be seen as a natural next step
from the grid-utility model. Some successful cloud architectures have little or no centralized
infrastructure or billing systems whatsoever, including peer-to-peer networks like Bit Torrent
and Skype and volunteer computing like
3.2 Implementation:
The majority of cloud computing infrastructure as of 2009 consists of reliable services
delivered through data centers and built on servers with different levels of virtualization
technologies. The services are accessible anywhere that has access to networking
infrastructure. The Cloud appears as a single point of access for all the computing needs of
consumers. Commercial offerings need to meet the quality of service requirements of
customers and typically offer service level agreements. Open standards are critical to the
growth of cloud computing and open source software has provided the foundation for many
cloud computing implementations.
3.3 Characteristics:
On-Demand:
A basic condition that a cloud computing provider must fulfill is the ability to deliver
computing resources whenever the customer needs them. From the customers point of
view the available computing resources are nearly infinite (i.e., the customer is not
limited the set of servers located at one site and it is the responsibility of the cloud
computing provider to have sufficient resources to satisfy the requirements of all their
customers).
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Utilizing computing resources on-demand is one of the most desired capabilities for a
large number of enterprises because it eliminates the need for planning ahead, purchasing,
and installing the resources they will require at some point in the future. This enables the
customer to avoid making an unnecessary upfront investment in servers. Furthermore,
when comparing cloud computing with the traditional model of owning the servers, cloud
computing will helps avoid the costs of having underused resources. Effectively the
cloud computing vendor is doing what firms such as EDS did when it started to run
service bureaus - by combining the needs of multiple firms the service bureau is able to
take advantages of the effects of resource pooling.
Pay-per-
use:
Another new aspect of cloud computing is application of an usage based billing model.
The customer pays only for short term use of processors or storage, for example this
usage could be metered in increments of hours or days; converting what would have been
capital expenses (CAPEX) into operational expenses (OPEX).
We can see that the concept of cloud computing is strongly related to the idea of
utility computing. In both cases the computing resources are being provided on-demand,
much as electricity, water, or gas are supplied by a utility company; but in the case of
computing resources the waste product is largely heat and after some time scrap
computing equipment - hence the customer is essentially renting these computing
resources. However, unlike a traditional rental agreement where the resources would be
physically located at the customers premises, in the case of cloud computing the
resources are simply somewhere in the cloud - rather than in a single physical location.
Further note that unlike the case for water and gas, which when they are not used are
available for later use - not using processor cycles of a computer does in fact waste these
cycles - since they will not be available for usage later. Therefore it is advantageous for a
cloud computing provider to accept business to utilize all (or nearly all) of these cycles.
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Rapid Elasticity:
Based upon the specific of a service level agreement, the cloud provider scales up or down
the resources that are provided to meet the customers changing needs. This service level
agreement must define the response time for the cloud provider to adapt to the customers
needs. Such an agreement is needed by the cloud provider, because the cloud provider
does not in fact have infinite resources, so depending upon the service level agreement the
cloud provider has to find a set of allocations of resources that satisfy the current demands
of the aggregate of their users while meeting the various service level agreements of these
costumers - otherwise the service level agreement may specify a penalty that the cloud
provider has to pay to each customer for not meeting the relevant service level agreement.
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4. History
The Cloud is a term with a long history in telephony, which has in the past decade, been
adopted as a metaphor for internet based services, with a common depiction in network
diagrams as a cloud outline.
The underlying concept dates back to 1960 when John McCarthy opined that "computation
may someday be organized as a public utility"; indeed it shares characteristics with service
bureaus which date back to the 1960s. The term cloud had already come into commercial use
in the early 1990s to refer to large ATM networks. By the turn of the 21st century, the term
"cloud computing" had started to appear, although most of the focus at this time was on
Software as a service (SaaS).
In 1999, Salesforce.com was established by Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, and his fellows.
They applied many technologies of consumer web sites like Google and Yahoo! to business
applications. They also provided the concept of "On demand" and "SaaS" with their real
business and successful customers. The key for SaaS is being customizable by customer
alone or with a small amount of help. Flexibility and speed for application development have
been drastically welcomed and accepted by business users.
IBM extended these concepts in 2001, as detailed in the Autonomic Computing Manifesto --
which described advanced automation techniques such as self-monitoring, self-healing, self-
configuring, and self-optimizing in the management of complex IT systems with
heterogeneous storage, servers, applications, networks, security mechanisms, and other
system elements that can be virtualized across an enterprise.
Amazon.com played a key role in the development of cloud computing by modernizing their
data centers after the dot-com bubble and, having found that the new cloud architecture
resulted in significant internal efficiency improvements, providing access to their systems by
way of Amazon Web Services in 2005 on a utility computing basis.
2007 saw increased activity, with Google, IBM, and a number of universities embarking on a
large scale cloud computing research project, around the time the term started gaining
popularity in the mainstream press. It was a hot topic by mid-2008 and numerous cloud
computing events had been scheduled.
In August 2008, Gartner Research observed that "organizations are switching from company-
owned hardware and software assets to per-use service-based models" and that the "projected
shift to cloud computing will result in dramatic growth in IT products in some areas and in
significant reductions in other areas."
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5. Political Issues
The Cloud spans many borders and "may be the ultimate form of globalization." As such it
becomes subject to complex geopolitical issues: providers must satisfy myriad regulatory
environments in order to deliver service to a global market. This dates back to the early days
of the Internet, where libertarian thinkers felt that "cyberspace was a distinct place calling for
laws and legal institutions of its own"; author Neal Stephenson envisaged this as a tiny island
data haven called Kinakuta in his classic science-fiction novel Cryptonomicon.
Despite efforts (such as US-EU Safe Harbor) to harmonize the legal environment, as of 2009
providers such as Amazon Web Services cater to the major markets (typically the United
States and the European Union) by deploying local infrastructure and allowing customers to
select "availability zones." Nonetheless, there are still concerns about security and privacy
from individual through governmental level, e.g., the USA PATRIOT Act and use of national
security letters and the Electronic Communication Privacy Act's Stored Communications Act.
6. Legal Issues
In March 2007, Dell applied to trademark the term "cloud computing" (U.S. Trademark
77,139,082) in the United States. The "Notice of Allowance" it received in July 2008 was
canceled on August 6, resulting in a formal rejection of the trademark application less than a
week later.
Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, believes that cloud computing
endangers liberties because users sacrifice their privacy and personal data to a third party. In
November 2007, the Free Software Foundation released the Affero General Public License, a
version of GPLv3 designed to close a perceived legal loophole associated with free software
designed to be run over a network, particularly software as a service. An application service
provider is required to release any changes they make to Affero GPL open source code
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7. Architecture
Cloud architecture, the systems architecture of the software systems involved in the delivery
of cloud computing, comprises hardware and software designed by a cloud architect who
typically works for a cloud integrator. It typically involves multiple cloud components
communicating with each other over application programming interfaces, usually web
services.
This closely resembles the UNIX philosophy of having multiple programs doing one thing
well and working together over universal interfaces. Complexity is controlled and the
resulting systems are more manageable than their monolithic counterparts.
Cloud architecture extends to the client, where web browsers and/or software applications
access cloud applications.
Cloud storage architecture is loosely coupled, where metadata operations are centralized
enabling the data nodes to scale into the hundreds, each independently delivering data to
applications or user.
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8. Components
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8.1 Client
A cloud client consists of computer hardware and/or computer software that relies on
cloud computing for application delivery, or that is specifically designed for delivery of cloud
services and that, in either case, is essentially useless without it. Examples include some
computers, phones and other devices, operating systems and browsers
8.2 Application
8.3 Platform
8.4 Infrastructure
8.5 Service
A cloud service includes "products, services and solutions that are delivered and consumed in
real-time over the Internet". For example, Web Services ("software system[s] designed to
support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network") which may be
accessed by other cloud computing components, software, e.g., Software plus service, or end
users directly.
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Specific examples include:
8.6 Storage
Cloud storage involves the delivery of data storage as a service, including database-like
services, often billed on a utility computing basis, e.g., per gigabyte per month. For example:
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9. Standards
Cloud standards, a number of existing, typically lightweight, open standards, have facilitated
the growth of cloud computing, including:
Application:
o Communications (HTTP, XMPP)
o Security (OAuth, OpenID, SSL/TLS)
o Syndication (Atom)
Client:
o Browsers (AJAX)
o Offline (HTML 5)
Implementations:
o Virtualization (OVF)
Platform:
o Solution stacks (LAMP)
Service:
o Data (XML, JSON)
o Web Services (REST)
Storage:
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10. Cloud Computing service models
Cloud computing can be classified by the model of service it offers into one of three different
groups. These will be described using the XaaS taxonomy, first used by Scott Maxwell in
2006, where X is Software, Platform, or Infrastructure, and the final "S" is for Service.
It is important to note, as shown in Figure 2.1, that SaaS is built on PaaS, and the latter on
IaaS. Hence, this is not an excluding approach to classification, but rather it concerns the
level of the service provided. Each of these service models is described in a following
subsection.
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10.2 PaaS (Platform as a Service):
In the case of PaaS, the cloud provider not only provides the hardware, but they also provide
a toolkit and a number of supported programming languages to build higher level services
(i.e. software applications that are made available as part of a specific platform). The users
of PaaS are typically software developers who host their applications on the platform and
provide these applications to the end-users.
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11. Types
Douglas Parkhill first described the concept of a "private computer utility" in his 1966 book
The Challenge of the Computer Utility.
Private cloud sometimes also termed as internal cloud are implementations that some vendors
use these days to describe Cloud computing on private networks. A private cloud is a system
or collection of many systems that provide hosted access to all the systems and applications
that are internal to an organization.
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11.3 Public cloud:
Public cloud or external cloud describes cloud computing in the traditional way, where
resources are dynamically provided on a fine-grained, self-service basis over the
Internet. It is as termed as pay as you go manner and service is sold as Utility
computing.
Two clouds joined together are more correctly called a "combined cloud". A combined Cloud
Computing Environment consists of multiple internal and/or external providers, that are
generally used by Enterprises.
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12. Roles
12.1 Provider
A cloud computing provider or cloud computing service provider owns and operates live
cloud computing systems to deliver service to third parties. The barrier to entry is also
significantly higher with capital expenditure required and billing and management creates
some overhead. Nonetheless, significant operational efficiency and agility advantages can be
realized, even by small organizations, and server consolidation and virtualization rollouts are
already well underway. Amazon.com was the first such provider, modernizing its data centers
which, like most computer networks, were using as little as 10% of its capacity at any one
time just to leave room for occasional spikes. This allowed small, fast-moving groups to add
new features faster and easier, and they went on to open it up to outsiders as Amazon Web
Services in 2002 on a utility computing basis.
12.2 User
A user is a consumer of cloud computing. The privacy of users in cloud computing has
become of increasing concern. The rights of users are also an issue, which is being addressed
via a community effort to create a bill of rights.
12.3 Vendor
A vendor sells products and services that facilitate the delivery, adoption and use of cloud
computing. For example:
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13. Cost/Economics
Cloud computing users can avoid capital expenditure (CapEx) on hardware, software and
services, rather paying a provider only for what they use. Consumption is billed on a utility
(e.g. resources consumed, like electricity) or subscription (e.g. time based, like a newspaper)
basis with little or no upfront cost. Other benefits of this time sharing style approach are low
barriers to entry, shared infrastructure and costs, low management overhead and immediate
access to a broad range of applications. Users can generally terminate the contract at any time
(thereby avoiding return on investment risk and uncertainty) and the services are often
covered by service level agreements with financial penalties.
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13.1. Key Characteristics:
Cost is greatly reduced and capital expenditure is converted to operational
expenditure. This lowers barriers to entry, as infrastructure is typically provided by a
third-party and does not need to be purchased for one-time or infrequent intensive
computing tasks. Pricing on a utility computing basis is fine-grained with usage-based
options and minimal or no IT skills are required for implementation.
o Peak-load capacity increases (users need not engineer for highest possible
load-levels)
o Utilization and efficiency improvements for systems that are often only 10-
20% utilized.
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14. Security
The relative security of cloud computing services is a contentious issue which may be
delaying its adoption. Issues barring the adoption of cloud computing are due in large part to
the private and public sectors unease surrounding the external management of security based
services. It is the very nature of cloud computing based services, private or public, that
promote external management of provided services. This delivers great incentive amongst
cloud computing service providers in producing a priority in building and maintaining strong
management of secure services.
Organizations have been formed in order to provide standards for a better future in
cloud computing services. One organization in particular, the Cloud Security Alliance is a
non-profit organization formed to promote the use of best practices for providing security
assurance within cloud computing.
GOOGLE
The leader in cloud computing.
Google offers several services including e-mail and document creating applications.
AMAZON
o Amazon offers companies data storage services.
o More and more companies are starting to trust cloud computing services and turn
begin to store their data in the clouds.
MICROSOFT
The cloud computing industry is predicted to hurt the software business.
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They are offering Microsoft based document applications for the web for a small
monthly fee.
The US Defense Department is offering a new cloud computing service to its military
users called RACE.
They claim there services are more reliable and secure because security is their # 1
policy
I BM
IBM are developing cloud computing applications for the everyday user called
CloudBurst.
There has also been some talk of IBM coming together with Sun Microsystems to
enhance their ability to build data centers for this new technology.
IBM also offers private cloud computing services using IBM blue services
software.
Instead of putting information out on the internet it makes the companies data
center into its own cloud. This cloud is blocked off from the internet using
firewalls.
Reliability improves through the use of multiple redundant sites, which makes it
suitable for business continuity and disaster recovery. Nonetheless, most major cloud
computing services have suffered outages and IT and business managers are able to
do little when they are affected.
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cannot afford. Providers typically log accesses, but accessing the audit logs
themselves can be difficult or impossible.
14.2 Companies:
Providers including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Sun and Yahoo exemplify the use of cloud
computing. It is being adopted by individual users through large enterprises including
General Electric, L'Oral, and Procter & Gamble.
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15. Cloud Computing Pros and Cons
w.r.t.
Cost & Security
15.1 Pros:
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15.2 Cons:
Can be slow
Features might be limited
Stored data might not be secure
Stored data can be lost
Requires a constant Internet connection
Does not work well with low-speed connections
HPC Systems
General Concerns
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16. Limitations of Cloud Computing
Who will have access to the data and applications and how will that be monitored?
What security measures are used for data transmission and storage?
How are applications and data from different customers are kept separate?
Where, in terms of geographical location, will be the data stored? Could the choice of the
location affect me?
All these customer worries can be translated into what can be identified as the main
obstacles to the adoption and growth of cloud computing. Each of these obstacles are
examined in the following subsections.
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For instance, web browser vulnerabilities could lead to service delivery failures. A feasible
means to obtain a high degree of availability would be using multiple cloud computing
providers.
Cloud providers are well aware of these risks and today provide more information
about the current state of the system, as this is something that customers are demanding.
Salesforce for instance shows the real-time average response time for a server transaction at
Trust.salesforce.com. Amazon has implemented a service dashboard that displays basic
availability and status history.
An evolution towards standardized APIs would not only overcome this risk by allowing SaaS
to develop software services interoperable in all clouds, but would provide a firm basis to
progress towards hybrid computing models.
Google is the only cloud provider truly advancing to achieve a more standard environment
and they even have an initiative, called Data Liberation Front [36], to support users moving
data and applications in and out of their platform.
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A case study carried out by MIT and University of California at San Diego on the Amazon
EC2 service considered this style of attack an actual threat, and they demonstrated this attack
by successfully overcoming the following:
They were able to successfully perform all the previous steps given that patterns can be found
in the mapping of virtual machine instances into physical resources (for example, by
examining internal and external IP addresses of a large number of different types of
instances). In their tests they could launch co-resident instances with a 40% probability of
success. They state that the only certain way to avoid this threat is to require exclusive
physical resources, something that ultimately customers with high privacy requirements will
begin to ask for.
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16.5 Scaling resources:
The ability of scaling up or down resources to meet workload is one of the most desired cloud
computing advantages. However, this great advantage can lead to service failures if it is not
well implemented or if a maximum response time is not agreed upon beforehand. A web
application developer who hosts its service on a cloud may see how the response time
steadily increases when the usage of the application also increases - because the cloud does
not scale up resources quickly enough.
On the other hand, scaling must be limited by some threshold. This threshold would stop the
continuous increase in the allocation of resources to prevent the cloud provider from
suffering a denial of service attack because the customers application was malfunctioning. In
either case the customer could be billed for service that they did not want.
Existing service level agreements determine quality of service requirements, but not in terms
of response time in response to workload variations. There are proposed solutions in service
level agreements (SLA) for scalability implemented through statistical machine learning.
There are recent steps towards dealing with this issue. One is the Trusted Cloud
Computing Platform , which aims to apply the Trusted Computing model (developed in 2003
by Intel, AMD, HP, and IBM) to the cloud. However the scope of this initiative is to protect
against malicious insiders, inside the cloud provider organization.
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it to the cloud. When some data is required, the user uses the token generator to generate a
token and a decryption key. The token is sent to the cloud, the selected encrypted file(s) are
downloaded, and then these files are verified locally and decrypted using the key. Sharing is
enabled by sending the token and decryption key to another user that you want to collaborate
with. The enterprise version of the solution consists of adding a credential generator to
simplify the collaboration process.
Other relevant projects are also being conducted. One example is a recently published PhD
dissertation from Stanford University done by Craig Gentry in collaboration with IBM. This
research proposes A fully homomorphic encryption scheme. Using their proposed
encryption method data can be searched, sorted, and processed without decrypting it. The
innovation here is the refreshing mechanism necessary to maintain low levels of noise.
Although successful, both initiatives have turned out to be still too slow and result it very low
efficiency. As a result, they are not commercially utilized yet.
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probability can be reduced - however, this is at a quite high cost in time and disk I/O and may
not be completely successful.
In the latest report about cloud computing by the European Network and Information
Security Agency (ENISA) it has been suggested that if encryption were applied to data at
rest, the level of this risk would be considerably lower.
16.10 Th e O ffline c
lou d :
Being completely dependent upon an Internet connection might turn out to be impossible or
highly risky for some users who need an application (or data) to be available at all times. This
creates a bigger problem if the user is moving and the quality of the connection can change,
hence in some situations relying on a Internet service provider is simply not an option.
The so-called pure Cloud computing model causes this impediment. This model is based
on the fact that the most used software application nowadays is the web browser and that
today complete applications can be delivered as a service through the Internet and all of the
end-users interaction can occur through a web browser. An obvious conclusion is to build a
web based OS. In this approach the web browser acts as the interface to the rest of the system
and hardware, such as hard disks or powerful processors, would not be needed locally
anymore.
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17. Benefits
Any web application should be available to legitimate visitors from across the globe.
An efficient Cloud creates and spans multiple access points at various geographic
locations around the globe. The Cloud provider must effectively receive and route
incoming requests to the appropriate virtualized application on the cloud on behalf of its
customers.
Google and Microsoft replicate each application instance to multiple physical locations.
AT&T Synaptic Hosting spans multiple locations for its enterprise customers.
Cloud enables service on demand. We have use resources for as small as couple of
hours and pay for them accordingly. This the key advantage of the Cloud.
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Example: Lets consider the case of a University website. The web site doesnot expect much
traffic normally. But during the display of the exam results, the traffic may
increase exponentially. But the increase of traffic happens only once or twice a year during
the results so it is not wise for the management to buy huge infrastructure. In such a situation
Cloud could really help where the university can hire infrastructure for a weeks time and just
pay a small cost.
17.3 Security:
Security could improve due to centralization of data, increased security-focused resources,
etc. As the Cloud is maintained by the Cloud provider enterprises need to be involved in
security. The Cloud provider has the professionals who would further secure the Cloud.
SME's may not be able to hire highly paid security profesionals, so its better for them to hire
resources on Cloud.
17.4 Maintenance:
Maintenance cloud computing applications is not difficult, since they need not to be
installed on user's computer. Due to this it is easy to support and to update because
the changes can be done to clients instantly. Cloud infrastructure services or
"Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)" provides computer infrastructure as a virtual
platform, as a service. Rather than purchasing servers, software, data center space or
network equipment, clients instead buy those resources as a fully outsourced service.
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18. Risk Mitigation
Corporations or end-users wishing to avoid not being able to access their data or even
losing it should research vendors' policies on data security before using vendor services.
One technology analyst and consulting firm, Gartner, lists seven security issues which one
should discuss with a cloud-computing vendor:
1. Privileged user accessinquire about who has specialized access to data and about
the hiring and management of such administrators.
2. Regulatory compliancemakes sure a vendor is willing to undergo external audits
and/or security certifications.
3. Data locationsask if a provider allows for any control over the location of data.
4. Data segregationmake sure that encryption is available at all stages and that these
"encryption schemes were designed and tested by experienced professionals".
5. Recoveryfind out what will happen to data in the case of a disaster; do they offer
complete restoration and, if so, how long that would take.
6. Investigative Supportinquire whether a vendor has the ability to investigate any
inappropriate or illegal activity.
7. Long-term viabilityask what will happen to data if the company goes out of
business; how will data be returned and in what format.
In practice, one can best determine data-recovery capabilities by experiment: asking to get
back old data, seeing how long it takes, and verifying that the checksums match the original
data. Determining data security is harder. A tactic not covered by Gartner is to encrypt the
data yourself. If you encrypt the data using a trusted algorithm, then regardless of the service
provider's security and encryption policies, the data will only be accessible with the
decryption keys. This leads to a follow-on problem: managing private keys in a pay-on-
demand computing infrastructure.
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19. Discussions
According to Larry Ellison, The interesting thing about Cloud Computing is that we have
redefined Cloud Computing to include everything that we already do. . . . I dont
understand what we would do differently in the light of Cloud Computing other than change
the wording of some of our ads.
As per Andy Isherwood, A lot of people are jumping on the [cloud] bandwagon, but I have
not heard two people say the same thing about it. There are multiple definitions out there of
the cloud.
Richard Stallman, known for his advocacy of free software, thinks Cloud Computing is a
trap for users. If applications and data are managed in the cloud, users might become
dependent on proprietary systems whose costs and service terms may changed unilaterally
and adversely.
Richard Stallman used really harsh words for Cloud. He states that, Its stupidity. Its worse
than stupidity: its a marketing hype campaign. Somebody is saying this is inevitable and
whenever you hear somebody saying that, its very likely to be a set of businesses
campaigning to make it true.
Brad Jefferson in the favor of Cloud Computing States that, Cloud computing is really a no-
brainer for any start-up because it allows you to test your business plan very quickly for little
money. Every start-up, or even a division within a company that has an idea for something
new, should be figuring out how to use cloud computing in its plan.
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Mark benoiff, CEO of www.salesforce.com one of the biggest supporters of Cloud
computing said, The cloud services companies of all sizesThe cloud is for everyone. The
cloud is a democracy.
Vivek Kundra, Federal CIO of United states of America said, There was a time when every
household, town, farm or village had its own water well. Today, shared public utilities give
us access to clean water by simply turning on the tap; cloud computing works in a similar
fashion. Just like water from the tap in your kitchen, cloud computing services can be turned
on or off quickly as needed. Like at the water company, there is a team of dedicated
professionals making sure the service provided is safe, secure and available on a 24/7 basis.
When the tap isn't on, not only are you saving water, but you aren't paying for resources you
don't currently need.
Small businesses will now have the ability to use the same tools and techniques that larger
companies enjoyed for years. They can leverage Web 2.0/ Social Media tools to connect with
prospects / customers, build their brand, and use Enterprise 2.0 tools to automate systems
within their workplace using free, inexpensive and simple tools.
Sahil Parikh CEO - Synage
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20. Case Study
This section presents the current cloud computing offers, distinguishing them basing on the
level of abstraction (i.e. the level of service) presented to the programmer and the level of
management of the resources.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2): The IaaS product of Amazon is the leader in
its class. It supplies customers with a pay-as-you-go resource that can include storage
or computation. EC2 has a web interface for requesting virtual machines as server
instances. An EC2 instance seems like physical hardware and its relatively low level
of abstraction (i.e. by definition, IaaS have low levels of abstraction when compared
to PaaS or SaaS. Customers have the chance to increase or decrease the number of
server instances, then AWS reacts by scaling the number of instances up or down.
Server instances are available in three different sizes; each one having a different
amount of memory, computing power, and bandwidth.
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) implements a dynamically scalable storage ser-
vice which can be used to host applications that are subsequently offered to end-users.
20.2 Rackspace:
Rackspace offers infrastructure as a service (IaaS), named Cloudservers, or a platform as a
service, Cloudsites, to host web applications with scaling needs. Rackspace also provides
Cloudfiles, a storage service, which can be combined with a content delivery network
(CDN) service. This latter service competes directly with the CDN from Amazon, called
Cloudfront, but Rackspace, unlike Amazon, does not charges for bandwidth consumption
between the storage service and the CDN.
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20.3 GoGrid:
GoGrid provides infrastructure as a service (IaaS), standing as a direct competitor to
Amazon or Rackspace. GoGrid offers a competitive service consisting on dedicated hosted
servers in their cloud facilities. Thus they are a provider of virtual or physical infrastructure
on-demand, unlike Amazon (who only supplies virtual infrastructure on-demand). Addition-
ally, GoGrid complements the offer of dedicated infrastructure with an hybrid environment
that enables users of their dedicated hosting service to request virtual resources to handle
usage spikes.
20.4 Salesforce:
Salesforce (software as a service (SaaS)), is one of the pioneers in cloud computing.
Salesforces first and still main product is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) web
service. Salesforce has focused on enterprise customers and has added new applications on
top of its CRM. While earlier Salesforce only offered SaaS class products, in 2002 Salesforce
shifted towards the PaaS market with the release of their Force.com platform that allows
developers to develop applications that will execute natively on their Salesforce platform or
be integrated with third party services. In the case of Force.com, Salesforce is responsible for
scaling up or down the platform as needed, thus making the addition of new physical
resources transparent to the user.
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languages will be allowed in the future. In a move towards connecting both clouds, Google
and Salesforce have recently provided libraries that allow the developer to access the others
web services application programming interface (API) from applications. Once installed, the
application can seamlessly make web service API calls of the other service, hence integrating
applications hosted on both clouds.
The Azure Services platform currently runs only .NET Framework applications, but
Microsoft has indicated that a large range of languages will be supported. Indeed, two
software development kits (SDKs) have already been made available for interoperability
with the Azure Services platform that enable Java and Ruby developers to integrate their
application with .NET services.
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21. QUESTIONNAIRE RESULT
1 49 0 0%
50 249 1 17%
ICT 2 33%
Manufacturing 1 17%
Trade 1 17%
Financial 2 33%
Services
Government 0 0%
Other 0 0%
Part of an 2 33%
international
corporation
Yes 6 100%
No 0 0%
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Computing services?
Cloud Computing 0 0%
used in the past,
but projects have
been
discontinued
None at present, 0 0%
and not planning
within the next 12
months
Running a 2 33%
production
system at
present
IaaS:
Cloud Computing 0 0%
used in the past,
but projects have
been
discontinued.
Running a pilot 0 0%
project at present.
Running a 4 67%
production system
at present.
PaaS:
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Cloud Computing 0 0%
used in the past,
but projects have
been
discontinued.
None at present, 0 0%
and not planning
within the next 12
months.
Running a 1 17%
production system
at present.
1 25% 6 100%
26 50% 0 0%
51 75% 0 0%
76 0 0%
100%
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10% 0 0%
20& 0 0%
30% 1 17%
40% 3 50%
50% 2 33%
60% 0 0%
70% 0 0%
90% 0 0%
100% 0 0%
IaaS
10% 0 0%
20& 1 17%
30% 1 17%
40% 2 33%
50% 2 33%
60% 0 0%
70% 0 0%
90% 0 0%
100% 0 0%
PaaS
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10% 1 17%
20& 2 33%
30% 1 17%
40% 2 33%
50% 0 0%
60% 0 0%
70% 0 0%
90% 0 0%
100% 0 0%
SaaS 5 83%
IaaS 5 83%
PaaS 4 67%
People may select more than one
checkbox, so percentages may
add up to more than 100%.
SaaS 5 83%
IaaS 5 83%
PaaS 4 67%
People may select more than one
checkbox, so percentages may
add up to more than 100%.
0 0 0%
1 0 0%
2 3 50%
3 1 17%
3+ 2 33%
50
Q9). How many Cloud Computing service providers do you
have? - # global service providers
0 1 17%
1 1 17%
2 0 0%
3 0 0%
3+ 4 67%
0 0 0%
1 0 0%
2 3 50%
3 1 17%
3+ 2 33%
0 1 17%
1 1 17%
2 0 0%
3 2 33%
3+ 2 33%
0 0 0%
1 0 0%
2 3 50%
3 1 17%
3+ 2 33%
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PaaS - # global service providers
0 1 17%
1 1 17%
2 0 0%
3 0 0%
3+ 4 67%
Analytics 6 100%
Collaboration 5 83%
(e.g. office
applications)
Communication 5 83%
(e.g. email)
Content 4 67%
Management
Human 2 33%
Resources
IT Management 5 83%
Marketing 2 33%
CRM/Sales 2 33%
At present
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Analytics 5 83%
Communication 4 67%
(e.g. email)
Content 4 67%
Management
IT Management 1 17%
Marketing 4 67%
CRM/Sales 5 83%
Analytics 6 100%
Communication 6 100%
(e.g. email)
Content 6 100%
Management
IT Management 6 100%
Marketing 6 100%
CRM/Sales 6 100%
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checkbox, so percentages may
add up to more than 100%.
Compute 4 67%
(server
instances) (e.g.
Amazon EC2)
At present
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Force.com 4 67%
ZOHO Creator 0 0%
WorkXpress 1 17%
Wolf 0 0%
Frameworks
People may select more than one
checkbox, so percentages may
add up to more than 100%.
Other please specify
Q13). What were your main motivations for adopting Cloud
Computing?
Better 5 83%
responsiveness
to changing
requirements
Rapid 5 83%
implementation
Improved 4 67%
scalability
(elasticity)
People may select more than one
checkbox, so percentages may
add up to more than 100%.
IaaS
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Cost reduction 5 100%
(TCO)
Better 5 100%
responsiveness to
changing
requirements
Rapid 5 100%
implementation
Improved 4 80%
scalability
(elasticity)
People may select more than one
checkbox, so percentages may
add up to more than 100%.
PaaS
Better 6 100%
responsiveness to
changing
requirements
Rapid 5 83%
implementation
Improved 4 67%
scalability
(elasticity)
People may select more than one
checkbox, so percentages may
add up to more than 100%.
Based on a 6 100%
recommendation
of service
provider/system
integrator
People may select more than one
checkbox, so percentages may
add up to more than 100%.
Security 5 83%
concerns
Governance 5 83%
concerns
Lack of 4 67%
availability of
suitable
services
Dependence on 4 67%
external service
provider
Legal 4 67%
constraints
People may select more than one
checkbox, so percentages may
add up to more than 100%.
IaaS
High Cost 5 83%
Governance 4 67%
concerns
Lack of 5 83%
availability of
suitable services
Dependence on 4 67%
external service
provider
PaaS
Security 5 83%
concerns
Governance 5 83%
concerns
Lack of 5 83%
availability of
suitable services
Dependence on 5 83%
external service
provider
Q16). What are your main concerns now, i.e. after adopting
Cloud Computing?
Security 5 83%
concerns
Governance 5 83%
concerns
Lack of 4 67%
availability of
suitable services
Dependence on 6 100%
external service
provider
IaaS
Security 3 50%
concerns
Governance 3 50%
concerns
Lack of 2 33%
availability of
suitable services
Dependence on 6 100%
external service
provider
PaaS
Security 3 50%
concerns
Governance 3 50%
concerns
Lack of 5 83%
availability of
suitable services
Dependence on 4 67%
external service
provider
Not 0 0%
Applicable
Total Failure 0 0%
Partial 0 0%
Failure
Success, 2 33%
benefits as
expected
Success, 2 33%
exceeded
expectations
IaaS
Not Applicable 0 0%
Total Failure 0 0%
Partial Failure 0 0%
Success, 2 33%
exceeded
expectations
PaaS
Not Applicable 0 0%
Total Failure 0 0%
Partial Failure 0 0%
Success, 1 17%
exceeded
expectations
22. CONCLUSION
Companies have to pick and choose and be careful with what data they allow to be out
there in a cloud.
Cloud computing can be a useful resource to help companies save money but can also
have downfalls.
The average citizen doesn't want their personal information unprotected and available.
As companies perfect their cloud computing services, I think that more companies
will be open to using these services.
This service will provide new inventive ways to use computers and provide services.
Cloud computing is picking up and there are few early winners who adopted the technology.
Companies that used to take 20 years to build up an infrastructure can now be done in merely
weeks or months. The most dependable solutions from number of vendors are still in the
early stage but will definitely pick up in very short time. May be the coming years will let us
know whether Cloud computing is the one of the best emerging technologies of all times or
just an over hyped phenomenon.
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23. References
[2]. www.infoworld.com/article/08/04/07/15FE-cloud-computing-reality_1.html
[3]. www.wiki.cloudcommunity.org/wiki/CloudComputing:Bill_of_Rights
[5]. www.amazon.com
[6]. www.thinkgos.com/cloud/index.html
[7]. www.salesforce.com
[8]. www.google.com
[17]. www.wikipedia.com
[18]. www.iitweb.bloomu.com
[19]. www.devcentral.f5.com
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