Management And Security Of Multi-Cloud Applications

Single cloud management platform technology has reached maturity and is quite successful in information technology applications. Enterprises and application service providers are increasingly adopting a multi-cloud strategy to reduce the risk of cloud service provider lock-in and cloud blackouts and, at the same time, get the benefits like competitive pricing, the flexibility of resource provisioning and better points of presence. Another class of applications that are getting cloud service providers increasingly interested in is the carriers\u27 virtualized network services. However, virtualized carrier services require high levels of availability and performance and impose stringent requirements on cloud services. They necessitate the use of multi-cloud management and innovative techniques for placement and performance management. We consider two classes of distributed applications – the virtual network services and the next generation of healthcare – that would benefit immensely from deployment over multiple clouds. This thesis deals with the design and development of new processes and algorithms to enable these classes of applications. We have evolved a method for optimization of multi-cloud platforms that will pave the way for obtaining optimized placement for both classes of services. The approach that we have followed for placement itself is predictive cost optimized latency controlled virtual resource placement for both types of applications. To improve the availability of virtual network services, we have made innovative use of the machine and deep learning for developing a framework for fault detection and localization. Finally, to secure patient data flowing through the wide expanse of sensors, cloud hierarchy, virtualized network, and visualization domain, we have evolved hierarchical autoencoder models for data in motion between the IoT domain and the multi-cloud domain and within the multi-cloud hierarchy

Entrepreneurship in an Established Company

There are some fundamental differences between how you go about being innovative in a startup and how you go about it when you have more than 350 customers in 75 countries already running their business on your product. Put another way, you have to approach entrepreneurship differently when you have over 2,000 active deployments serving 40 million people every day. We faced that challenge at Movius Interactive Corporation. This article provides a description of how we took on the challenge of revitalizing innovation and entrepreneurship and how open source plays a part

Modern computing: vision and challenges

Over the past six decades, the computing systems field has experienced significant transformations, profoundly impacting society with transformational developments, such as the Internet and the commodification of computing. Underpinned by technological advancements, computer systems, far from being static, have been continuously evolving and adapting to cover multifaceted societal niches. This has led to new paradigms such as cloud, fog, edge computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT), which offer fresh economic and creative opportunities. Nevertheless, this rapid change poses complex research challenges, especially in maximizing potential and enhancing functionality. As such, to maintain an economical level of performance that meets ever-tighter requirements, one must understand the drivers of new model emergence and expansion, and how contemporary challenges differ from past ones. To that end, this article investigates and assesses the factors influencing the evolution of computing systems, covering established systems and architectures as well as newer developments, such as serverless computing, quantum computing, and on-device AI on edge devices. Trends emerge when one traces technological trajectory, which includes the rapid obsolescence of frameworks due to business and technical constraints, a move towards specialized systems and models, and varying approaches to centralized and decentralized control. This comprehensive review of modern computing systems looks ahead to the future of research in the field, highlighting key challenges and emerging trends, and underscoring their importance in cost-effectively driving technological progress

Elastic Highly Available Cloud Computing

High availability and elasticity are two the cloud computing services technical features. Elasticity is a key feature of cloud computing where provisioning of resources is closely tied to the runtime demand. High availability assure that cloud applications are resilient to failures. Existing cloud solutions focus on providing both features at the level of the virtual resource through virtual machines by managing their restart, addition, and removal as needed. These existing solutions map applications to a specific design, which is not suitable for many applications especially virtualized telecommunication applications that are required to meet carrier grade standards. Carrier grade applications typically rely on the underlying platform to manage their availability by monitoring heartbeats, executing recoveries, and attempting repairs to bring the system back to normal. Migrating such applications to the cloud can be particularly challenging, especially if the elasticity policies target the application only, without considering the underlying platform contributing to its high availability (HA). In this thesis, a Network Function Virtualization (NFV) framework is introduced; the challenges and requirements of its use in mobile networks are discussed. In particular, an architecture for NFV framework entities in the virtual environment is proposed. In order to reduce signaling traffic congestion and achieve better performance, a criterion to bundle multiple functions of virtualized evolved packet-core in a single physical device or a group of adjacent devices is proposed. The analysis shows that the proposed grouping can reduce the network control traffic by 70 percent. Moreover, a comprehensive framework for the elasticity of highly available applications that considers the elastic deployment of the platform and the HA placement of the application’s components is proposed. The approach is applied to an internet protocol multimedia subsystem (IMS) application and demonstrate how, within a matter of seconds, the IMS application can be scaled up while maintaining its HA status

Modern computing: Vision and challenges

Over the past six decades, the computing systems field has experienced significant transformations, profoundly impacting society with transformational developments, such as the Internet and the commodification of computing. Underpinned by technological advancements, computer systems, far from being static, have been continuously evolving and adapting to cover multifaceted societal niches. This has led to new paradigms such as cloud, fog, edge computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT), which offer fresh economic and creative opportunities. Nevertheless, this rapid change poses complex research challenges, especially in maximizing potential and enhancing functionality. As such, to maintain an economical level of performance that meets ever-tighter requirements, one must understand the drivers of new model emergence and expansion, and how contemporary challenges differ from past ones. To that end, this article investigates and assesses the factors influencing the evolution of computing systems, covering established systems and architectures as well as newer developments, such as serverless computing, quantum computing, and on-device AI on edge devices. Trends emerge when one traces technological trajectory, which includes the rapid obsolescence of frameworks due to business and technical constraints, a move towards specialized systems and models, and varying approaches to centralized and decentralized control. This comprehensive review of modern computing systems looks ahead to the future of research in the field, highlighting key challenges and emerging trends, and underscoring their importance in cost-effectively driving technological progress

A Cloud-based Intrusion Detection and Prevention System for Mobile Voting in South Africa

Publishe ThesisInformation and Communication Technology (ICT) has given rise to new technologies and solutions that were not possible a few years ago. One of these new technologies is electronic voting, also known as e-voting, which is the use of computerised equipment to cast a vote. One of the subsets of e-voting is mobile voting (m-voting). M-voting is the use of mobile phones to cast a vote outside the restricted electoral boundaries. Mobile phones are pervasive; they offer connection anywhere, at any time. However, utilising a fast-growing medium such as the mobile phone to cast a vote, poses various new security threats and challenges. Mobile phones utilise equivalent software design used by personal computers which makes them vulnerable or exposed to parallel security challenges like viruses, Trojans and worms. In the past, security solutions for mobile phones encountered several restrictions in practice. Several methods were used; however, these methods were developed to allow lightweight intrusion detection software to operate directly on the mobile phone. Nevertheless, such security solutions are bound to fail securing a device from intrusions as they are constrained by the restricted memory, storage, computational resources, and battery power of mobile phones. This study compared and evaluated two intrusion detection systems (IDSs), namely Snort and Suricata, in order to propose a cloud-based intrusion detection and prevention system (CIDPS) for m-voting in South Africa. It employed simulation as the primary research strategy to evaluate the IDSs. A quantitative research method was used to collect and analyse data. The researcher established that as much as Snort has been the preferred intrusion detection and prevention system (IDPS) in the past, Suricata presented more effective and accurate results close to what the researcher anticipated. The results also revealed that, though Suricata was proven effective enough to protect m-voting while saving the computational resources of mobile phones, more work needs to be done to alleviate the false-negative alerts caused by the anomaly detection method. This study adopted Suricata as a suitable cloud-based analysis engine to protect a mobile voting application like XaP

Network functions virtualization: the long road to commercial deployments

Network operators are under pressure to offer efficient network-based services while keeping service deployment costs to a minimum. Network functions virtualization (NFV) can potentially revolutionize network-based services bringing low-deployment costs for network operators. The NFV has been introduced to ultimately extend the non-proprietary and open-standard-based model to network and service deployments, significant improvements to today’s proprietary locked implementations. Notwithstanding the continuous efforts of both academia and industry to support the NFV paradigm, the current NFV solutions offered are still in its infancy. In this survey, we provide a detailed background of NFV to establish a comprehensive understanding of the subject, ranging from the basics to more advanced topics. Moreover, we offer a comprehensive overview of the NFV main concepts, standardization efforts, the benefits of NFV, and discussions of the NFV architecture as defined by the European telecommunications standardization institute (ETSI). Furthermore, we discuss the NFV applicability and current open source projects. We then highlight NFV requirements, design considerations, and developmental architectural impairments and barriers to commercial NFV deployments. Finally, we conclude enumerating future directions for NFV developmentpublishe