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

Stealth databases : ensuring user-controlled queries in untrusted cloud environments

Sensitive data is increasingly being hosted online in ubiquitous cloud storage services. Recent advances in multi-cloud service integration through provider multiplexing and data dispersion have alleviated most of the associated risks for hosting files which are retrieved by users for further processing. However, for structured data managed in databases, many issues remain, including the need to perform operations directly on the remote data to avoid costly transfers. In this paper, we motivate the need for distributed stealth databases which combine properties from structure-preserving dispersed file storage for capacity-saving increased availability with emerging work on structure-preserving encryption for on-demand increased confidentiality with controllable performance degradation. We contribute an analysis of operators executing in map-reduce or map-carry-reduce phases and derive performance statistics. Our prototype, StealthDB, demonstrates that for typical amounts of personal structured data, stealth databases are a convincing concept for taming untrusted and unsafe cloud environments

Consumer Acceptance of Personal Cloud: Integrating Trust and Risk with the Technology Acceptance Model

This paper conducts a conceptual replication of Pavlou (2003) which studied factors that impacted consumer’s behavioral intentions to make online transactions by integrating trust and perceived risk with the technology acceptance model (TAM). We test the generalizability of the model by replicating the study a decade later using a different online setting—personal cloud computing. Our results that are based on 240 observations, confirm the original study’s research model except perceived ease of use lost its direct predictive power to trust, perceived risk and perceived usefulness. Trust continues to be an important factor in perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness and should be an area of focus in online marketing strategies. Perceived usefulness continued to have a significant relationship for consumer’s intentions to use, but perceived ease of use did not affect consumer’s intention to use. Thus, more online businesses should focus on the usefulness of their service(s). Future studies are encouraged to methodologically replicate this study in different contexts and after another period in time to examine whether results hold. *This article has been revised to correct an error (September 2016)

Consumer Acceptance of Personal Cloud: Integrating Trust and Risk with the Technology Acceptance Model

This paper conducts a conceptual replication of Pavlou (2003) which studied factors that impacted consumer’s behavioral intentions to make online transactions by integrating trust and perceived risk with the technology acceptance model (TAM). We test the generalizability of the model by replicating the study a decade later using a different online setting—personal cloud computing. Our results that are based on 240 observations, confirm the original study’s research model except perceived ease of use lost its direct predictive power to trust, perceived risk and perceived usefulness. Trust continues to be an important factor in perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness and should be an area of focus in online marketing strategies. Perceived usefulness continued to have a significant relationship for consumer’s intentions to use, but perceived ease of use did not affect consumer’s intention to use. Thus, more online businesses should focus on the usefulness of their service(s). Future studies are encouraged to methodologically replicate this study in different contexts and after another period in time to examine whether results hold. *This article has been revised to correct an error (September 2016)

A platform to deploy customized scientific virtual infrastructures on the cloud

This paper presents a software platform to dynamically deploy complex scientific virtual computing infrastructures, on top of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Clouds. The platform orchestrates different services to provision the virtual computing resources. It dynamically installs the appropriate software to satisfy the requirements of a researcher, both on public and on-premise Clouds. The platform provides a web interface to enable the users to easily management of the lifecycle of virtual infrastructures. It enables users to define infrastructures, share them with other users, deploy and relinquish them, add or remove resources dynamically, create and share application recipes, etc. The paper also describes three case studies to deploy complex infrastructures, namely a Hadoop cluster, a single-node to perform NGS sequencing and a gateway for users to access the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI). This platform promotes a better use of on-premise hardware resources of a research center by allocating the computing resources just-in-time to the specific life time of the virtual infrastructures as well as the deployment of the very same infrastructures on a public Cloud.The authors would to thank the Spanish "Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad" for the project "Clusters Virtuales Elasticos y Migrables sobre Infraestructuras Cloud Hibridas" with reference TIN2013-44390-R.Caballer Fernández, M.; Segrelles Quilis, JD.; Moltó, G.; Blanquer Espert, I. (2015). A platform to deploy customized scientific virtual infrastructures on the cloud. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience. 27(16):4318-4329. https://doi.org/10.1002/cpe.3518S431843292716Mell P Grance T The NIST definition of Cloud computing. NIST Special Publication 800-145 (Final) Technical Report 2011 http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-145/SP800-145.pdfBuyya, R., Broberg, J., & Goscinski, A. (Eds.). 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