Secure data sharing and processing in heterogeneous clouds

The extensive cloud adoption among the European Public Sector Players empowered them to own and operate a range of cloud infrastructures. These deployments vary both in the size and capabilities, as well as in the range of employed technologies and processes. The public sector, however, lacks the necessary technology to enable effective, interoperable and secure integration of a multitude of its computing clouds and services. In this work we focus on the federation of private clouds and the approaches that enable secure data sharing and processing among the collaborating infrastructures and services of public entities. We investigate the aspects of access control, data and security policy languages, as well as cryptographic approaches that enable fine-grained security and data processing in semi-trusted environments. We identify the main challenges and frame the future work that serve as an enabler of interoperability among heterogeneous infrastructures and services. Our goal is to enable both security and legal conformance as well as to facilitate transparency, privacy and effectivity of private cloud federations for the public sector needs. © 2015 The Authors

InterCloud: Utility-Oriented Federation of Cloud Computing Environments for Scaling of Application Services

Cloud computing providers have setup several data centers at different geographical locations over the Internet in order to optimally serve needs of their customers around the world. However, existing systems do not support mechanisms and policies for dynamically coordinating load distribution among different Cloud-based data centers in order to determine optimal location for hosting application services to achieve reasonable QoS levels. Further, the Cloud computing providers are unable to predict geographic distribution of users consuming their services, hence the load coordination must happen automatically, and distribution of services must change in response to changes in the load. To counter this problem, we advocate creation of federated Cloud computing environment (InterCloud) that facilitates just-in-time, opportunistic, and scalable provisioning of application services, consistently achieving QoS targets under variable workload, resource and network conditions. The overall goal is to create a computing environment that supports dynamic expansion or contraction of capabilities (VMs, services, storage, and database) for handling sudden variations in service demands. This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural elements of InterCloud for utility-oriented federation of Cloud computing environments. The proposed InterCloud environment supports scaling of applications across multiple vendor clouds. We have validated our approach by conducting a set of rigorous performance evaluation study using the CloudSim toolkit. The results demonstrate that federated Cloud computing model has immense potential as it offers significant performance gains as regards to response time and cost saving under dynamic workload scenarios.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, conference pape

Adoption of Cloud Computing in India

The researcher looks at adoption and applicability of cloud computing to e-governance in India. Data has been gathered via structured questionnaire from stakeholders of various businesses - public & private sector of India, including Indian IT companies that offer cloud computing solutions to clients. The study takes a balanced and unbiased view of cloud computing with focus on India, to figure out the key factors that lead to its adoption using factor analysis and whether these factors could be the drivers for its adoption in e-governance. Cloud computing has picked up in developed markets and is starting to pick up in India. For enterprises, SMB, Government, NGO & individuals - it reduces initial investments, results in cost savings, gives flexibility, scalability, service on demand, device independency and anytime accessibility and reduces key data loss in the event of hardware crash, loss or theft. However, it has issues like confidentiality, information security, legal & regulatory challenges and malicious attacks as data gets stored in a distributive internet cloud, generally beyond any nation\\\'s geography. The intended target audience for this research are Union & State Governments, Large Municipal Corporations, National Federation of Urban cooperative and credit bank societies Ltd

A threshold secure data sharing scheme for federated clouds

Cloud computing allows users to view computing in a new direction, as it uses the existing technologies to provide better IT services at low-cost. To offer high QOS to customers according SLA, cloud services broker or cloud service provider uses individual cloud providers that work collaboratively to form a federation of clouds. It is required in applications like Real-time online interactive applications, weather research and forecasting etc., in which the data and applications are complex and distributed. In these applications secret data should be shared, so secure data sharing mechanism is required in Federated clouds to reduce the risk of data intrusion, the loss of service availability and to ensure data integrity. So In this paper we have proposed zero knowledge data sharing scheme where Trusted Cloud Authority (TCA) will control federated clouds for data sharing where the secret to be exchanged for computation is encrypted and retrieved by individual cloud at the end. Our scheme is based on the difficulty of solving the Discrete Logarithm problem (DLOG) in a finite abelian group of large prime order which is NP-Hard. So our proposed scheme provides data integrity in transit, data availability when one of host providers are not available during the computation.Comment: 8 pages, 3 Figures, International Journal of Research in Computer Science 2012. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1003.3920 by other author

Innovative public governance through cloud computing: Information privacy, business models and performance measurement challenges

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify and analyze challenges and to discuss proposed solutions for innovative public governance through cloud computing. Innovative technologies, such as federation of services and cloud computing, can greatly contribute to the provision of e-government services, through scaleable and flexible systems. Furthermore, they can facilitate in reducing costs and overcoming public information segmentation. Nonetheless, when public agencies use these technologies, they encounter several associated organizational and technical changes, as well as significant challenges. Design/methodology/approach: We followed a multidisciplinary perspective (social, behavioral, business and technical) and conducted a conceptual analysis for analyzing the associated challenges. We conducted focus group interviews in two countries for evaluating the performance models that resulted from the conceptual analysis. Findings: This study identifies and analyzes several challenges that may emerge while adopting innovative technologies for public governance and e-government services. Furthermore, it presents suggested solutions deriving from the experience of designing a related platform for public governance, including issues of privacy requirements, proposed business models and key performance indicators for public services on cloud computing. Research limitations/implications: The challenges and solutions discussed are based on the experience gained by designing one platform. However, we rely on issues and challenges collected from four countries. Practical implications: The identification of challenges for innovative design of e-government services through a central portal in Europe and using service federation is expected to inform practitioners in different roles about significant changes across multiple levels that are implied and may accelerate the challenges' resolution. Originality/value: This is the first study that discusses from multiple perspectives and through empirical investigation the challenges to realize public governance through innovative technologies. The results emerge from an actual portal that will function at a European level. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Cloud computing services: taxonomy and comparison

Cloud computing is a highly discussed topic in the technical and economic world, and many of the big players of the software industry have entered the development of cloud services. Several companies what to explore the possibilities and benefits of incorporating such cloud computing services in their business, as well as the possibilities to offer own cloud services. However, with the amount of cloud computing services increasing quickly, the need for a taxonomy framework rises. This paper examines the available cloud computing services and identifies and explains their main characteristics. Next, this paper organizes these characteristics and proposes a tree-structured taxonomy. This taxonomy allows quick classifications of the different cloud computing services and makes it easier to compare them. Based on existing taxonomies, this taxonomy provides more detailed characteristics and hierarchies. Additionally, the taxonomy offers a common terminology and baseline information for easy communication. Finally, the taxonomy is explained and verified using existing cloud services as examples