SCADA SYSTEMS IN THE CLOUD AND FOG ENVIRONMENTS: MIGRATION SCENARIOS AND SECURITY ISSUES

This paper addresses scenarios and security issues when migrating SCADA systems to cloud and fog environments. Migration strategies to the cloud refer to different cloud infrastructures (public, private or hybrid) as well as selection of cloud service. Benefits of cloud-based SCADA systems mainly refer to improving economic efficiency. We further address migration risks, with regards to quality of service and cyber security. Challenges in security provisioning encompass security solutions, risk management and test environment. Finally, we address emerging evolution of SCADA toward fog computing, including the three-tier system’s architecture and security issues

Cloud Computing and Big Data for Oil and Gas Industry Application in China

The oil and gas industry is a complex data-driven industry with compute-intensive, data-intensive and business-intensive features. Cloud computing and big data have a broad application prospect in the oil and gas industry. This research aims to highlight the cloud computing and big data issues and challenges from the informatization in oil and gas industry. In this paper, the distributed cloud storage architecture and its applications for seismic data of oil and gas industry are focused on first. Then,cloud desktop for oil and gas industry applications are also introduced in terms of efficiency, security and usability. Finally, big data architecture and security issues of oil and gas industry are analyzed. Cloud computing and big data architectures have advantages in many aspects, such as system scalability, reliability, and serviceability. This paper also provides a brief description for the future development of Cloud computing and big data in oil and gas industry. Cloud computing and big data can provide convenient information sharing and high quality service for oil and gas industry

Data Migration in Cloud: A Systematic Review

Data migration needs to  securely transfer for maintaining confidentiality such that migration can strongly and effectively done with no data loss due to active attacks . Many techniques and methods have already been proposed by researchers around the world to secure data migration. This paper provides a critical overview of these problems and solutions and giving a proposed solution for data migration that is Attunity which can help to optimize data for replicating and transferring data thus providing a simple, faster and safer path to accelerate data by providing

Järjestelmä- ja luotettavuusvaatimusten toteutuminen pilvipohjaisessa SCADA-järjestelmässä

Pilvipalveluiden käyttö perinteisessä IT-maailmassa on viime vuosien aikana lisääntynyt, ja teollisuuden neljännen vallankumouksen myötä pilvipalvelut ovat muodostuneet tärkeäksi osaksi myös teollisuusautomaatiojärjestelmiä. Teollisuusautomaatiossa tuotantoprosessin monitorointiin ja hallintaan käytetyn SCADA (engl. Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) -järjestelmän pilvi-integraatio mahdollistaisi järjestelmälle perinteisen IT-maailman ominaisuuksia kuten skaalautuvuutta ja etäkäyttömahdollisuuden. Teollisuusjärjestelmien vaatimukset ovat kuitenkin perinteistä IT-maailmaa tiukempia, ja yksityisessä verkossa paikallisesti käytettäväksi suunnitellun SCADA-järjestelmän vienti pilvipalveluun vaikeuttaa näiden vaatimusten toteutumista entisestään. Tässä työssä pyritään kirjallisuustutkimuksen avulla selvittämään toteutuvatko SCADA-järjestelmän pilvi-integraation kannalta oleellisimmat järjestelmä- ja luotettavuusvaatimukset riittävän hyvin pilvipohjaisessa toteutuksessa. Järjestelmävaatimuksista tutkitaan reaaliaikaisuuden ja luotettavuusvaatimuksista järjestelmän saatavuuden sekä tietoturvallisuuden ja kyberturvallisuuden toteutumista. Lisäksi kirjallisuuden pohjalta tutkitaan pilvipohjaisen SCADA-järjestelmän yritykselle tuomia etuja ja mahdollisuuksia. Työssä todetaan pilveen liikennöinnistä ja pilvessä prosessoinnista aiheutuvien viiveiden olevan pieniä, ja siten reaaliaikavaatimusten toteutuvan riittävän hyvin täyttäen SCADA-järjestelmän kiertokyselyvälin asettamat vaatimukset verkkoyhteyksien normaalitilassa. Merkittäviä viiveitä ei myöskään synny kommunikaatioyhteyksien salauksesta tai pilvipalvelimien maantieteellisestä hajauttamisesta. Saatavuuden osalta todetaan, etteivät suurimmatkaan pilvipalveluntarjoajat vielä yllä korkean saatavuuden vaatimuksiin, ja siten lyhyetkin saatavuuskatkokset voivat muodostua ongelmaksi pilvipohjaisille SCADA-järjestelmille. Saatavuutta voidaan kuitenkin parantaa pilvessä maantieteellisellä hajautuksella, muttei sillä voida kuitenkaan poistaa saatavuuden menetyksen riskiä kokonaan. Tietototurvan puolesta pilviympäristön todetaan altistavan SCADA-järjestelmä uusille tietoturvariskeille ja SCADA-ohjelmistojen tietoturvan olevan riittämätön lisääntyneiden SCADA-järjestelmiin kohdistuvien hyökkäysten edessä. Yhteenvetona työssä todetaan, etteivät vaatimukset toteudu riittävällä tasolla kriittisten tuotantoprosessien SCADA-järjestelmille, mutta ovat riittävät esimerkiksi etävalvomon pilvipohjaiselle toteutukselle. Etuja pilvipohjaiselle SCADA-järjestelmälle työssä todetaan olevan muutamia. Pilvipohjainen toteutus voi esimerkiksi mahdollistaa järjestelmän nopeamman kehityksen, kustannussäästöjä, järjestelmän etäkäytön, vähentyneen ylläpidon tarpeen sekä pilvipalvelun ominaisuudet kuten helpon skaalautuvuuden

Securing Infrastructure-as-a-Service Public Clouds Using Security Onion

The shift to Cloud computing has brought with it its specific security challenges concerning the loss of control, trust and multi-tenancy especially in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Cloud model. This article focuses on the design and development of an intrusion detection system (IDS) that can handle security challenges in IaaS Cloud model using an open source IDS. We have implemented a proof-of-concept prototype on the most deployed hypervisor—VMware ESXi—and performed various real-world cyber-attacks, such as port scanning and denial of service (DoS) attacks to validate the practicality and effectiveness of our proposed IDS architecture. Based on our experimental results we found that our Security Onion-based IDS can provide the required protection in a reasonable and effective manner

Contributions to Edge Computing

Efforts related to Internet of Things (IoT), Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Machine to Machine (M2M) technologies, Industrial Internet, and Smart Cities aim to improve society through the coordination of distributed devices and analysis of resulting data. By the year 2020 there will be an estimated 50 billion network connected devices globally and 43 trillion gigabytes of electronic data. Current practices of moving data directly from end-devices to remote and potentially distant cloud computing services will not be sufficient to manage future device and data growth. Edge Computing is the migration of computational functionality to sources of data generation. The importance of edge computing increases with the size and complexity of devices and resulting data. In addition, the coordination of global edge-to-edge communications, shared resources, high-level application scheduling, monitoring, measurement, and Quality of Service (QoS) enforcement will be critical to address the rapid growth of connected devices and associated data. We present a new distributed agent-based framework designed to address the challenges of edge computing. This actor-model framework implementation is designed to manage large numbers of geographically distributed services, comprised from heterogeneous resources and communication protocols, in support of low-latency real-time streaming applications. As part of this framework, an application description language was developed and implemented. Using the application description language a number of high-order management modules were implemented including solutions for resource and workload comparison, performance observation, scheduling, and provisioning. A number of hypothetical and real-world use cases are described to support the framework implementation

Visualization & Automation of Shams Dubai Report

Dubai’s Smart Grid strategy includes the implementation of Distributed Energy Resources and Distribution Automation (DA) facilities to continuous monitoring and remote control from DEWA’s Distribution Control Center (DCC) , and, in some cases, automatic control of electric distribution assets operated at 33kV or lower. The increase level of telemetry and automation in the field imposes a greater challenge in monitoring and live data visualization for establishing a decision support system that empowers distribution system operators and enables optimal control of existing and planned assets. This challenge can be overcome through introducing data science tools in the sector of energy. Through imposing certain reporting and visualization tool, the data generated utilization level is improved which will lead to an increase in reliability and efficiency, rise asset utilization, workforce productivity, decision making, thus, increase customer satisfaction. The use case covered during this capstone proposal is one of the daily reports generated by distribution operation department manually on the daily bases. During this project, data science tools will be benchmarked accordingly to distribution power utility needs of reporting and anticipating certain parameters such as distribution solar generation and key performance indicators (SAIDI, SAIFI, CML, MTTR, MTBF etc.). The selected tool will be utilized to generate live reports/ dashboards and to decrease the level of manpower intervention. This proposal will highlights the background of the project, problem statement, project definition and goals and explains project methodology and evaluation followed by project deliverables & timeline

Analysis of the Requirements and Methods of Cloud Migration to SaaS Model

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Knowledge Management and Business IntelligenceIn a fast pace changing globe, where quality and security is a must have and the threads are new every day, companies and IT administrations still doubt about the benefits in running a cloud-based technology and stick with local systems which can be expensive in Cybersecurity and vulnerable at their own risk. This thesis aims to provide guidance and understanding of the key factors that serve as a foundation for the process of migrating a system to a cloud-based software. There are three main types of cloud computing service models and in this thesis is only considered SaaS, also known as Software-as-a-Service. The focus is to demystify some ghosts regarding cloud-based technology, through a comprehensive Model Migration proposal with step-to-step indications, based on a thorough Methodology which is supported by a Literature Review to clarify and justify the decisions made

Future Trends and Directions for Secure Infrastructure Architecture in the Education Sector: A Systematic Review of Recent Evidence

The most efficient approach to giving large numbers of students’ access to computational resources is through a data center. A contemporary method for building the data center\u27s computer infrastructure is the software-defined model, which enables user tasks to be processed in a reasonable amount of time and at a reasonable cost. The researcher examines potential directions and trends for a secured infrastructure design in this article. Additionally, interoperable, highly reusable modules that can include the newest trends in the education industry are made possible by cloud-based educational software. The Reference Architecture for University Education System Using AWS Services is presented in the paper. In conclusion, automation boosts efficiency by 20% while decreasing researcher involvement in kinetics modeling using CHEMKIN by 10%. Future work will focus on integrating GPUs into open-source programs that will be automated and shared on CloudFlame as a service resource for cooperation in the educational sector

Reference deployment models for eliminating user concerns on cloud security

Cloud computing has become a hot topic both in research and in industry, and when making decisions on deploying/adopting cloud computing related solutions, security has always been a major concern. This article summarizes security related issues in cloud computing and proposes five service deployment models to address these issues. The proposed models provide different security related features to address different requirements and scenarios and can serve as reference models for deployment