Autonomic Cloud Computing: Open Challenges and Architectural Elements

As Clouds are complex, large-scale, and heterogeneous distributed systems, management of their resources is a challenging task. They need automated and integrated intelligent strategies for provisioning of resources to offer services that are secure, reliable, and cost-efficient. Hence, effective management of services becomes fundamental in software platforms that constitute the fabric of computing Clouds. In this direction, this paper identifies open issues in autonomic resource provisioning and presents innovative management techniques for supporting SaaS applications hosted on Clouds. We present a conceptual architecture and early results evidencing the benefits of autonomic management of Clouds.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, conference keynote pape

Towards A Well-Secured Electronic Health Record in the Health Cloud

The major concerns for most cloud implementers particularly in the health care industry have remained data security and privacy. A prominent and major threat that constitutes a hurdle for practitioners within the health industry from exploiting and benefiting from the gains of cloud computing is the fear of theft of patients health data in the cloud. Investigations and surveys have revealed that most practitioners in the health care industry are concerned about the risk of health data mix-up amongst the various cloud providers, hacking to comprise the cloud platform and theft of vital patients’ health data.An overview of the diverse issues relating to health data privacy and overall security in the cloud are presented in this technical report. Based on identifed secure access requirements, an encryption-based eHR security model for securing and enforcing authorised access to electronic health data (records), eHR is also presented. It highlights three core functionalities for managing issues relating to health data privacy and security of eHR in health care cloud

Reporting an Experience on Design and Implementation of e-Health Systems on Azure Cloud

Electronic Health (e-Health) technology has brought the world with significant transformation from traditional paper-based medical practice to Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)-based systems for automatic management (storage, processing, and archiving) of information. Traditionally e-Health systems have been designed to operate within stovepipes on dedicated networks, physical computers, and locally managed software platforms that make it susceptible to many serious limitations including: 1) lack of on-demand scalability during critical situations; 2) high administrative overheads and costs; and 3) in-efficient resource utilization and energy consumption due to lack of automation. In this paper, we present an approach to migrate the ICT systems in the e-Health sector from traditional in-house Client/Server (C/S) architecture to the virtualised cloud computing environment. To this end, we developed two cloud-based e-Health applications (Medical Practice Management System and Telemedicine Practice System) for demonstrating how cloud services can be leveraged for developing and deploying such applications. The Windows Azure cloud computing platform is selected as an example public cloud platform for our study. We conducted several performance evaluation experiments to understand the Quality Service (QoS) tradeoffs of our applications under variable workload on Azure.Comment: Submitted to third IEEE International Conference on Cloud and Green Computing (CGC 2013

A Case Study for Business Integration as a Service

This paper presents Business Integration as a Service (BIaaS) to allow two services to work together in the Cloud to achieve a streamline process. We illustrate this integration using two services; Return on Investment (ROI) Measurement as a Service (RMaaS) and Risk Analysis as a Service (RAaaS) in the case study at the University of Southampton. The case study demonstrates the cost-savings and the risk analysis achieved, so two services can work as a single service. Advanced techniques are used to demonstrate statistical services and 3D Visualisation services under the remit of RMaaS and Monte Carlo Simulation as a Service behind the design of RAaaS. Computational results are presented with their implications discussed. Different types of risks associated with Cloud adoption can be calculated easily, rapidly and accurately with the use of BIaaS. This case study confirms the benefits of BIaaS adoption, including cost reduction and improvements in efficiency and risk analysis. Implementation of BIaaS in other organisations is also discussed. Important data arising from the integration of RMaaS and RAaaS are useful for management and stakeholders of University of Southampton

SOFTWARE: FROM PRODUCT TO SERVICE THE EVOLUTION OF A MODEL

Among the consequences of the Enterprise 2.0 family technologies’ growingpopularity, we can observe the rise of a set of new business models for the use and employment ofsoftware applications, some of them also applicable for infrastructure components. The mostpopular of these models is by far Software as a Service (also called SaaS). SaaS is a softwaredistribution model assuming the software applications are hosted and maintained by the vendor orthe distributor, the user access being granted exclusively by means of the Internet. The paper athand is a literature review and also an action research, meant to provide an objective and unbiasedcomparison of the two major software distribution models, and also to identify the strengths, theweaknesses and the favorite areas of applicability for each model. The paper is a part of a largerresearch performed by the author in the field of Enterprise 2.0 technologies.Organizational knowledge, Enterprise 2.0, Software as a Service, Web 2.0, Semantic Web