23,474 research outputs found
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
Technical Report on Deploying a highly secured OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure using BradStack as a Case Study
Cloud computing has emerged as a popular paradigm and an attractive model for
providing a reliable distributed computing model.it is increasing attracting
huge attention both in academic research and industrial initiatives. Cloud
deployments are paramount for institution and organizations of all scales. The
availability of a flexible, free open source cloud platform designed with no
propriety software and the ability of its integration with legacy systems and
third-party applications are fundamental. Open stack is a free and opensource
software released under the terms of Apache license with a fragmented and
distributed architecture making it highly flexible. This project was initiated
and aimed at designing a secured cloud infrastructure called BradStack, which
is built on OpenStack in the Computing Laboratory at the University of
Bradford. In this report, we present and discuss the steps required in
deploying a secured BradStack Multi-node cloud infrastructure and conducting
Penetration testing on OpenStack Services to validate the effectiveness of the
security controls on the BradStack platform. This report serves as a practical
guideline, focusing on security and practical infrastructure related issues. It
also serves as a reference for institutions looking at the possibilities of
implementing a secured cloud solution.Comment: 38 pages, 19 figures
Trusted Computing and Secure Virtualization in Cloud Computing
Large-scale deployment and use of cloud computing in industry
is accompanied and in the same time hampered by concerns regarding protection of
data handled by cloud computing providers. One of the consequences of moving
data processing and storage off company premises is that organizations have
less control over their infrastructure. As a result, cloud service (CS) clients
must trust that the CS provider is able to protect their data and
infrastructure from both external and internal attacks. Currently however, such
trust can only rely on organizational processes declared by the CS
provider and can not be remotely verified and validated by an external party.
Enabling the CS client to verify the integrity of the host where the
virtual machine instance will run, as well as to ensure that the virtual
machine image has not been tampered with, are some steps towards building
trust in the CS provider. Having the tools to perform such
verifications prior to the launch of the VM instance allows the CS
clients to decide in runtime whether certain data should be stored- or calculations
should be made on the VM instance offered by the CS provider.
This thesis combines three components -- trusted computing, virtualization technology
and cloud computing platforms -- to address issues of trust and
security in public cloud computing environments. Of the three components,
virtualization technology has had the longest evolution and is a cornerstone
for the realization of cloud computing. Trusted computing is a recent
industry initiative that aims to implement the root of trust in a hardware
component, the trusted platform module. The initiative has been formalized
in a set of specifications and is currently at version 1.2. Cloud computing
platforms pool virtualized computing, storage and network resources in
order to serve a large number of customers customers that use a multi-tenant
multiplexing model to offer on-demand self-service over broad network.
Open source cloud computing platforms are, similar to trusted computing, a
fairly recent technology in active development.
The issue of trust in public cloud environments is addressed
by examining the state of the art within cloud computing security and
subsequently addressing the issues of establishing trust in the launch of a
generic virtual machine in a public cloud environment. As a result, the thesis
proposes a trusted launch protocol that allows CS clients
to verify and ensure the integrity of the VM instance at launch time, as
well as the integrity of the host where the VM instance is launched. The protocol
relies on the use of Trusted Platform Module (TPM) for key generation and data protection.
The TPM also plays an essential part in the integrity attestation of the
VM instance host. Along with a theoretical, platform-agnostic protocol,
the thesis also describes a detailed implementation design of the protocol
using the OpenStack cloud computing platform.
In order the verify the implementability of the proposed protocol, a prototype
implementation has built using a distributed deployment of OpenStack.
While the protocol covers only the trusted launch procedure using generic
virtual machine images, it presents a step aimed to contribute towards
the creation of a secure and trusted public cloud computing environment
Microservice Transition and its Granularity Problem: A Systematic Mapping Study
Microservices have gained wide recognition and acceptance in software
industries as an emerging architectural style for autonomic, scalable, and more
reliable computing. The transition to microservices has been highly motivated
by the need for better alignment of technical design decisions with improving
value potentials of architectures. Despite microservices' popularity, research
still lacks disciplined understanding of transition and consensus on the
principles and activities underlying "micro-ing" architectures. In this paper,
we report on a systematic mapping study that consolidates various views,
approaches and activities that commonly assist in the transition to
microservices. The study aims to provide a better understanding of the
transition; it also contributes a working definition of the transition and
technical activities underlying it. We term the transition and technical
activities leading to microservice architectures as microservitization. We then
shed light on a fundamental problem of microservitization: microservice
granularity and reasoning about its adaptation as first-class entities. This
study reviews state-of-the-art and -practice related to reasoning about
microservice granularity; it reviews modelling approaches, aspects considered,
guidelines and processes used to reason about microservice granularity. This
study identifies opportunities for future research and development related to
reasoning about microservice granularity.Comment: 36 pages including references, 6 figures, and 3 table
Calm before the storm: the challenges of cloud computing in digital forensics
Cloud computing is a rapidly evolving information technology (IT) phenomenon. Rather than procure, deploy and manage a physical IT infrastructure to host their software applications, organizations are increasingly deploying their infrastructure into remote, virtualized environments, often hosted and managed by third parties. This development has significant implications for digital forensic investigators, equipment vendors, law enforcement, as well as corporate compliance and audit departments (among others). Much of digital forensic practice assumes careful control and management of IT assets (particularly data storage) during the conduct of an investigation. This paper summarises the key aspects of cloud computing and analyses how established digital forensic procedures will be invalidated in this new environment. Several new research challenges addressing this changing context are also identified and discussed
StackInsights: Cognitive Learning for Hybrid Cloud Readiness
Hybrid cloud is an integrated cloud computing environment utilizing a mix of
public cloud, private cloud, and on-premise traditional IT infrastructures.
Workload awareness, defined as a detailed full range understanding of each
individual workload, is essential in implementing the hybrid cloud. While it is
critical to perform an accurate analysis to determine which workloads are
appropriate for on-premise deployment versus which workloads can be migrated to
a cloud off-premise, the assessment is mainly performed by rule or policy based
approaches. In this paper, we introduce StackInsights, a novel cognitive system
to automatically analyze and predict the cloud readiness of workloads for an
enterprise. Our system harnesses the critical metrics across the entire stack:
1) infrastructure metrics, 2) data relevance metrics, and 3) application
taxonomy, to identify workloads that have characteristics of a) low sensitivity
with respect to business security, criticality and compliance, and b) low
response time requirements and access patterns. Since the capture of the data
relevance metrics involves an intrusive and in-depth scanning of the content of
storage objects, a machine learning model is applied to perform the business
relevance classification by learning from the meta level metrics harnessed
across stack. In contrast to traditional methods, StackInsights significantly
reduces the total time for hybrid cloud readiness assessment by orders of
magnitude
VIRTUALIZED BASEBAND UNITS CONSOLIDATION IN ADVANCED LTE NETWORKS USING MOBILITY- AND POWER-AWARE ALGORITHMS
Virtualization of baseband units in Advanced Long-Term Evolution networks and a rapid performance growth of general purpose processors naturally raise the interest in resource multiplexing. The concept of resource sharing and management between virtualized instances is not new and extensively used in data centers. We adopt some of the resource management techniques to organize virtualized baseband units on a pool of hosts and investigate the behavior of the system in order to identify features which are particularly relevant to mobile environment. Subsequently, we introduce our own resource management algorithm specifically targeted to address some of the peculiarities identified by experimental results
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