Data management support pack

This pack is designed to help you produce high quality, reusable and open data from your research activities. It consists of documents, templates and videos covering the different aspects of data management and ranging from the overarching concepts and strategies through to the day-to-day activities. For each of the videos in the pack we have included a transcript of the narrative. The Data Management Support Pack was created to support the implementation of the CCAFS Data Management strategy

The Rules of Standard Setting Organizations: An Empirical Analysis

This paper empirically explores the procedures employed by standard-setting organizations. Consistent with Lerner-Tirole (2004), we find (a) a negative relationship between the extent to which an SSO is oriented to technology sponsors and the concession level required of sponsors and (b) a positive correlation between the sponsor-friendliness of the selected SSO and the quality of the standard. We also develop and test two extensions of the earlier model: the presence of provisions mandating royalty-free licensing is negatively associated with disclosure requirements, and when there are only a limited number of SSOs, the relationship between concessions and user friendliness is weaker.

Security Audit Compliance for Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has grown largely over the past three years and is widely popular amongst today's IT landscape. In a comparative study between 250 IT decision makers of UK companies they said, that they already use cloud services for 61% of their systems. Cloud vendors promise "infinite scalability and resources" combined with on-demand access from everywhere. This lets cloud users quickly forget, that there is still a real IT infrastructure behind a cloud. Due to virtualization and multi-tenancy the complexity of these infrastructures is even increased compared to traditional data centers, while it is hidden from the user and outside of his control. This makes management of service provisioning, monitoring, backup, disaster recovery and especially security more complicated. Due to this, and a number of severe security incidents at commercial providers in recent years there is a growing lack of trust in cloud infrastructures. This thesis presents research on cloud security challenges and how they can be addressed by cloud security audits. Security requirements of an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud are identified and it is shown how they differ from traditional data centres. To address cloud specific security challenges, a new cloud audit criteria catalogue is developed. Subsequently, a novel cloud security audit system gets developed, which provides a flexible audit architecture for frequently changing cloud infrastructures. It is based on lightweight software agents, which monitor key events in a cloud and trigger specific targeted security audits on demand - on a customer and a cloud provider perspective. To enable these concurrent cloud audits, a Cloud Audit Policy Language is developed and integrated into the audit architecture. Furthermore, to address advanced cloud specific security challenges, an anomaly detection system based on machine learning technology is developed. By creating cloud usage profiles, a continuous evaluation of events - customer specific as well as customer overspanning - helps to detect anomalies within an IaaS cloud. The feasibility of the research is presented as a prototype and its functionality is presented in three demonstrations. Results prove, that the developed cloud audit architecture is able to mitigate cloud specific security challenges

Network service orchestration standardization:a technology survey

Network services underpin operator revenues, and value-added services provide income beyond core (voice and data) infrastructure capability. Today, operators face multiple challenges: a need to innovate and offer a wider choice of value-added services, whilst increasing network scale, bandwidth and flexibility. They must also reduce operational costs, and deploy services far faster - in minutes rather than days or weeks. In the recent years, the network community, motivated by the aforementioned challenges, has developed production network architectures and seeded technologies, like Software Defined Networking, Application-based Network Operations and Network Function Virtualization. These technologies enhance the highly desired properties for elasticity, agility and cost-effectiveness in the operator environment. A key requirement to fully exploit the benefits of these new architectures and technologies is a fundamental shift in management and control of resources, and the ability to orchestrate the network infrastructure: coordinate the instantiation of high-level network services across different technological domains and automate service deployment and re-optimization. This paper surveys existing standardization efforts for the orchestration - automation, coordination, and management - of complex set of network and function resources (both physical and virtual), and highlights the various enabling technologies, strengths and weaknesses, adoption challenges for operators, and areas where further research is required

A mid-level framework for independent network services configuration management

Tese doutoramento do Programa Doutoral em TelecomunicaçõesDecades of evolution in communication network’s resulted in a high diversity of solutions, not only in terms of network elements but also in terms of the way they are managed. From a management perspective, having heterogeneous elements was a feasible scenario over the last decades, where management activities were mostly considered as additional features. However, with the most recent advances on network technology, that includes proposals for future Internet as well as requirements for automation, scale and efficiency, new management methods are required and integrated network management became an essential issue. Most recent solutions aiming to integrate the management of heterogeneous network elements, rely on the application of semantic data translations to obtain a common representation between heterogeneous managed elements, thus enabling their management integration. However, the realization of semantic translations is very complex to be effectively achieved, requiring extensive processing of data to find equivalent representation, besides requiring the administrator’s intervention to create and validate conversions, since contemporary data models lack a formal semantic representation. From these constrains a research question arose: Is it possible to integrate the con g- uration management of heterogeneous network elements overcoming the use of manage- ment translations? In this thesis the author uses a network service abstraction to propose a framework for network service management, which comprehends the two essential management operations: monitoring and configuring. This thesis focus on describing and experimenting the subsystem responsible for the network services configurations management, named Mid-level Network Service Configuration (MiNSC), being the thesis most important contribution. The MiNSC subsystem proposes a new configuration management interface for integrated network service management based on standard technologies that includes an universal information model implemented on unique data models. This overcomes the use of management translations while providing advanced management functionalities, only available in more advanced research projects, that includes scalability and resilience improvement methods. Such functionalities are provided by using a two-layer distributed architecture, as well as over-provisioning of network elements. To demonstrate MiNSC’s management capabilities, a group of experiments was conducted, that included, configuration deployment, instance migration and expansion using a DNS management system as test bed. Since MiNSC represents a new architectural approach, with no direct reference for a quantitative evaluation, a theoretical analysis was conducted in order to evaluate it against important integrated network management perspectives. It was concluded that there is a tendency to apply management translations, being the most straightforward solution when integrating the management of heterogeneous management interfaces and/or data models. However, management translations are very complex to be realized, being its effectiveness questionable for highly heterogeneous environments. The implementation of MiNSC’s standard configuration management interface provides a simplified perspective that, by using universal configurations, removes translations from the management system. Its distributed architecture uses independent/universal configurations and over-provisioning of network elements to improve the service’s resilience and scalability, enabling as well a more efficient resource management by dynamically allocating resources as needed

Automated Bidding in Computing Service Markets. Strategies, Architectures, Protocols

This dissertation contributes to the research on Computational Mechanism Design by providing novel theoretical and software models - a novel bidding strategy called Q-Strategy, which automates bidding processes in imperfect information markets, a software framework for realizing agents and bidding strategies called BidGenerator and a communication protocol called MX/CS, for expressing and exchanging economic and technical information in a market-based scheduling system