30,997 research outputs found
On Evaluating Commercial Cloud Services: A Systematic Review
Background: Cloud Computing is increasingly booming in industry with many
competing providers and services. Accordingly, evaluation of commercial Cloud
services is necessary. However, the existing evaluation studies are relatively
chaotic. There exists tremendous confusion and gap between practices and theory
about Cloud services evaluation. Aim: To facilitate relieving the
aforementioned chaos, this work aims to synthesize the existing evaluation
implementations to outline the state-of-the-practice and also identify research
opportunities in Cloud services evaluation. Method: Based on a conceptual
evaluation model comprising six steps, the Systematic Literature Review (SLR)
method was employed to collect relevant evidence to investigate the Cloud
services evaluation step by step. Results: This SLR identified 82 relevant
evaluation studies. The overall data collected from these studies essentially
represent the current practical landscape of implementing Cloud services
evaluation, and in turn can be reused to facilitate future evaluation work.
Conclusions: Evaluation of commercial Cloud services has become a world-wide
research topic. Some of the findings of this SLR identify several research gaps
in the area of Cloud services evaluation (e.g., the Elasticity and Security
evaluation of commercial Cloud services could be a long-term challenge), while
some other findings suggest the trend of applying commercial Cloud services
(e.g., compared with PaaS, IaaS seems more suitable for customers and is
particularly important in industry). This SLR study itself also confirms some
previous experiences and reveals new Evidence-Based Software Engineering (EBSE)
lessons
The silver lining: cloud computing and small and medium enterprises
This paper shows how Australian businesses can get the most out of one of the biggest global innovations: information communications technology.
Overview: Innovation – the successful application of new ideas – drives Australia’s productivity. Australia’s biggest innovation opportunity lies in creatively exploiting global innovations. One of the biggest of these is information and communications technology.
Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are an engine of the Australian economy. They employ two-thirds of Australian private sector workers and contribute half of Australia’s private sector GDP. Yet many SMEs have low productivity. Innovations may spread slowly to many smaller firms because they lack the capital or market intelligence that large firms can access.
Online innovations – including mobile devices, e-commerce, and cloud computing – offer opportunities for firms of all sizes to become far more productive.
This paper explores issues raised at a workshop run by Grattan Institute and Google on how policymakers and business can accelerate the spread of cloud computing among SMEs. It uses cloud computing – the delivery of on-demand information technology services over the Internet – as a case study for how online technologies can benefit smaller firms.
Cloud computing can help level the playing field for smaller firms. It allows them to access sophisticated IT services that were previously out of reach. For example, it can allow them to manage and monitor their sales, operations and finances in real time.
The cloud also offers capabilities that were previously unavailable to firms of any scale. For example, it allows multiple users to access applications or update documents at the same time from mobile devices. Cloud computing makes it easier for small firms to take new ideas to market. Firms that use cloud computing report more growth in revenue and profit than others do.
But many Australian SMEs say they do not use cloud services. Many are not aware of the benefits or believe they do not have skills to capture them. Some are concerned about transition costs, data security and privacy. Networks are too slow or unreliable for cloud services in some areas of the country.
Workshop participants agreed that government and industry can remove obstacles to the use of cloud computing and help SMEs capture its benefits. The industry itself should lead the education of SMEs on the case for cloud computing. Yet government can:
Choose policy settings that promote broader productivity growth and innovation;
Ensure interaction with government over the internet is the default for all businesses;
Provide an appropriate policy environment for investment in broadband networks that meet the needs of small business.
Information technology’s contribution to productivity is just getting started. Small and medium enterprises should get on board
On a Catalogue of Metrics for Evaluating Commercial Cloud Services
Given the continually increasing amount of commercial Cloud services in the
market, evaluation of different services plays a significant role in
cost-benefit analysis or decision making for choosing Cloud Computing. In
particular, employing suitable metrics is essential in evaluation
implementations. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is not any
systematic discussion about metrics for evaluating Cloud services. By using the
method of Systematic Literature Review (SLR), we have collected the de facto
metrics adopted in the existing Cloud services evaluation work. The collected
metrics were arranged following different Cloud service features to be
evaluated, which essentially constructed an evaluation metrics catalogue, as
shown in this paper. This metrics catalogue can be used to facilitate the
future practice and research in the area of Cloud services evaluation.
Moreover, considering metrics selection is a prerequisite of benchmark
selection in evaluation implementations, this work also supplements the
existing research in benchmarking the commercial Cloud services.Comment: 10 pages, Proceedings of the 13th ACM/IEEE International Conference
on Grid Computing (Grid 2012), pp. 164-173, Beijing, China, September 20-23,
201
Security and Privacy Issues in Cloud Computing
Cloud computing transforming the way of information technology (IT) for consuming and managing, promising improving cost efficiencies, accelerate innovations, faster time-to-market and the ability to scale applications on demand (Leighton, 2009). According to Gartner, while the hype grew ex-ponentially during 2008 and continued since, it is clear that there is a major shift towards the cloud computing model and that the benefits may be substantial (Gartner Hype-Cycle, 2012). However, as the shape of the cloud computing is emerging and developing rapidly both conceptually and in reality, the legal/contractual, economic, service quality, interoperability, security and privacy issues still pose significant challenges. In this chapter, we describe various service and deployment models of cloud computing and identify major challenges. In particular, we discuss three critical challenges: regulatory, security and privacy issues in cloud computing. Some solutions to mitigate these challenges are also proposed along with a brief presentation on the future trends in cloud computing deployment
SensorCloud: Towards the Interdisciplinary Development of a Trustworthy Platform for Globally Interconnected Sensors and Actuators
Although Cloud Computing promises to lower IT costs and increase users'
productivity in everyday life, the unattractive aspect of this new technology
is that the user no longer owns all the devices which process personal data. To
lower scepticism, the project SensorCloud investigates techniques to understand
and compensate these adoption barriers in a scenario consisting of cloud
applications that utilize sensors and actuators placed in private places. This
work provides an interdisciplinary overview of the social and technical core
research challenges for the trustworthy integration of sensor and actuator
devices with the Cloud Computing paradigm. Most importantly, these challenges
include i) ease of development, ii) security and privacy, and iii) social
dimensions of a cloud-based system which integrates into private life. When
these challenges are tackled in the development of future cloud systems, the
attractiveness of new use cases in a sensor-enabled world will considerably be
increased for users who currently do not trust the Cloud.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, published as technical report of the Department
of Computer Science of RWTH Aachen Universit
Cross-disciplinary lessons for the future internet
There are many societal concerns that emerge as a consequence of Future Internet (FI) research and development. A survey identified six key social and economic issues deemed most relevant to European FI projects. During a SESERV-organized workshop, experts in Future Internet technology engaged with social scientists (including economists), policy experts and other stakeholders in analyzing the socio-economic barriers and challenges that affect the Future Internet, and conversely, how the Future Internet will affect society, government, and business. The workshop aimed to bridge the gap between those who study and those who build the Internet. This chapter describes the socio-economic barriers seen by the community itself related to the Future Internet and suggests their resolution, as well as investigating how relevant the EU Digital Agenda is to Future Internet technologists
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