Enterprise 2.0 – Is The Market Ready?

Enterprise 2.0 family technologies have growing popularity, the cloud computing market is growing rapidly and, as a consequence, companies of all sizes start to evaluate the potential fit. The use of “Software as a Service”, “Platform as a Service” and “Infrastructure as a Service” has been evolving during the past years and has become increasingly popular. As its computing viability and benefits are legitimized, the adoption rate is rapidly increasing. The most popular business model in the abovementioned family is by far “Software as a Service” (also called SaaS), which is a software distribution model assuming the software applications are hosted and maintained by the vendor or the distributor, and user access is granted exclusively by means of the Internet. Based on both literature review and action research, the paper at hand is a synthesis for the results of an empirical study performed during the last two years among Romanian and foreign companies, in order to outline and provide an objective and unbiased answer to the question: “Is the market ready for these technologies or did they come too soon?”. The paper is a part of a larger research performed by the author in the field of Enterprise 2.0 technologies.Enterprise 2.0, Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, Empirical study

Security and Privacy Issues in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing transforming the way of information technology (IT) for consuming and managing, promising improving cost efficiencies, accelerate innovations, faster time-to-market and the ability to scale applications on demand (Leighton, 2009). According to Gartner, while the hype grew ex-ponentially during 2008 and continued since, it is clear that there is a major shift towards the cloud computing model and that the benefits may be substantial (Gartner Hype-Cycle, 2012). However, as the shape of the cloud computing is emerging and developing rapidly both conceptually and in reality, the legal/contractual, economic, service quality, interoperability, security and privacy issues still pose significant challenges. In this chapter, we describe various service and deployment models of cloud computing and identify major challenges. In particular, we discuss three critical challenges: regulatory, security and privacy issues in cloud computing. Some solutions to mitigate these challenges are also proposed along with a brief presentation on the future trends in cloud computing deployment

Algorithms for advance bandwidth reservation in media production networks

Media production generally requires many geographically distributed actors (e.g., production houses, broadcasters, advertisers) to exchange huge amounts of raw video and audio data. Traditional distribution techniques, such as dedicated point-to-point optical links, are highly inefficient in terms of installation time and cost. To improve efficiency, shared media production networks that connect all involved actors over a large geographical area, are currently being deployed. The traffic in such networks is often predictable, as the timing and bandwidth requirements of data transfers are generally known hours or even days in advance. As such, the use of advance bandwidth reservation (AR) can greatly increase resource utilization and cost efficiency. In this paper, we propose an Integer Linear Programming formulation of the bandwidth scheduling problem, which takes into account the specific characteristics of media production networks, is presented. Two novel optimization algorithms based on this model are thoroughly evaluated and compared by means of in-depth simulation results