Digital curation and the cloud

Digital curation involves a wide range of activities, many of which could benefit from cloud deployment to a greater or lesser extent. These range from infrequent, resource-intensive tasks which benefit from the ability to rapidly provision resources to day-to-day collaborative activities which can be facilitated by networked cloud services. Associated benefits are offset by risks such as loss of data or service level, legal and governance incompatibilities and transfer bottlenecks. There is considerable variability across both risks and benefits according to the service and deployment models being adopted and the context in which activities are performed. Some risks, such as legal liabilities, are mitigated by the use of alternative, e.g., private cloud models, but this is typically at the expense of benefits such as resource elasticity and economies of scale. Infrastructure as a Service model may provide a basis on which more specialised software services may be provided. There is considerable work to be done in helping institutions understand the cloud and its associated costs, risks and benefits, and how these compare to their current working methods, in order that the most beneficial uses of cloud technologies may be identified. Specific proposals, echoing recent work coordinated by EPSRC and JISC are the development of advisory, costing and brokering services to facilitate appropriate cloud deployments, the exploration of opportunities for certifying or accrediting cloud preservation providers, and the targeted publicity of outputs from pilot studies to the full range of stakeholders within the curation lifecycle, including data creators and owners, repositories, institutional IT support professionals and senior manager

Hybrid clouds and mass customization strategy a mid market utilization

Worldwide globalization processes as well as rapid development of information and communication technologies (ICT) significantly determine modern business operations in each and every organization. The basic concept of mass customization as a new trend is to increase the variety of individually tailored products/services to meet customer needs without a large increase in production costs. It requires a highly flexible production technology though. Developing such technologies can be expensive and time-consuming. Clouds enable delivery of mass customized services/information in the “Data to Information to Knowledge“ chain. The aim of this paper is to introduce the way how the mid-market can utilize Public Cloud computing in conjunction with a secure Private Clouds and further more to propose a framework for mass customization and its collaboration in Cloud

Editors’ Introduction

When we commissioned the authors to write for our book we anticipated that these practitioners, operating at the forefront of their respective fields, would stimulate and provoke debate about academic libraries now and in the future. When we read the chapters as they were delivered we were not disappointed. We hope the reader will be struck by two seemingly disparate aspects of their content. On the one hand each chapter is highly individual, not only in style and content, but also in approach and reflection. On the other hand common themes emerge: notably the opportunity afforded by technology (especially mobile technology), the importance of training and development for library staff, and evaluation, as well as the interdependence of teaching and research and the role technology plays in bringing these even closer together. To focus these synergies and differences we decided to use word clouds to introduce each chapter. As we ran each chapter through Wordle[1] we saw themes and patterns emerging; we hope that readers of the book will find this a useful and stimulating contribution to each chapter and the book as a whole. A word cloud for the entire book has been created for the cover, demonstrating in a very graphic way the breadth and depth of the content

Building the Infrastructure for Cloud Security: A Solutions View

For cloud users and providers alike, security is an everyday concern, yet there are very few books covering cloud security as a main subject. This book will help address this information gap from an Information Technology solution and usage-centric view of cloud infrastructure security. The book highlights the fundamental technology components necessary to build and enable trusted clouds. Here also is an explanation of the security and compliance challenges organizations face as they migrate mission-critical applications to the cloud, and how trusted clouds, that have their integrity rooted in hardware, can address these challenges. This book provides: Use cases and solution reference architectures to enable infrastructure integrity and the creation of trusted pools leveraging Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT). Trusted geo-location management in the cloud, enabling workload and data location compliance and boundary control usages in the cloud. OpenStack-based reference architecture of tenant-controlled virtual machine and workload protection in the cloud. A reference design to enable secure hybrid clouds for a cloud bursting use case, providing infrastructure visibility and control to organizations

Library Resources: Procurement, Innovation and Exploitation in a Digital World

The possibilities of the digital future require new models for procurement, innovation and exploitation. Emma Crowley and Chris Spencer describe the skills staff need to deliver resources in hybrid and digital environments. The chapter demonstrates the innovative ways that librarians use to procure and exploit the wealth of resources available in a digital world. They also describe the technological developments that can be adopted to improve workflow processes and they highlight the challenges faced on this fascinating journey

Managing IT Operations in a Cloud-driven Enterprise: Case Studies

Enterprise IT needs a new approach to manage processes, applications and infrastructure which are distributed across a mix of environments. In an Enterprise traditionally a request to deliver an application to business could take weeks or months due to decision-making functions, multiple approval bodies and processes that exist within IT departments. These delays in delivering a requested service can lead to dissatisfaction, with the result that the line-of-business group may seek alternative sources of IT capabilities. Also the complex IT infrastructure of these enterprises cannot keep up with the demand of new applications and services from an increasingly dispersed and mobile workforce which results in slower rollout of critical applications and services, limited resources, poor operation visibility and control. In such scenarios, it’s better to adopt cloud services to substitute for new application deployment otherwise most Enterprise IT organizations face the risk of losing 'market share' to the Public Cloud. Using Cloud Model the organizations should increase ROI, lower TCO and operate with seamless IT operations. It also helps to beat shadow IT and the practice of resource over-or under provisioning. In this research paper we have given two case studies where we migrated two Enterprise IT application to public clouds for the purpose of lower TCO and higher ROI. By migrating, the IT organizations improved IT agility, enterprise-class software for performance, security and control. In this paper, we also focus on the advantages and challenges while adopting cloud services