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

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

Intelligent Management of Virtualised Computer Based Workloads and Systems

Managing the complexity within virtualised IT infrastructure platforms is a common problem for many organisations today. Computer systems are often highly consolidated into a relatively small physical footprint compared with previous decades prior to late 2000s, so much thought, planning and control is necessary to effectively operate such systems within the enterprise computing space. With the development of private, hybrid and public cloud utility computing this has become even more relevant; this work examines how such cloud systems are using virtualisation technology and embedded software to leverage advantages, and it uses a fresh approach of developing and creating an Intelligent decision engine (expert system). Its aim is to help reduce the complexity of managing virtualised computer-based platforms, through tight integration, high-levels of automation to minimise human inputs, errors, and enforce standards and consistency, in order to achieve better management and control. The thesis investigates whether an expert system known as the Intelligent Decision Engine (IDE) could aid the management of virtualised computer-based platforms. Through conducting a series of mixed quantitative and qualitative experiments in the areas of research, the initial findings and evaluation are presented in detail, using repeatable and observable processes and provide detailed analysis on the recorded outputs. The results of the investigation establish the advantages of using the IDE (expert system) to achieve the goal of reducing the complexity of managing virtualised computer-based platforms. In each detailed area examined, it is demonstrated how using a global management approach in combination with VM provisioning, migration, failover, and system resource controls can create a powerful autonomous system

Inter-organisational systems: a personal history

The observations reported in this paper are based on an auto-ethnography of a participative engagement in the emergence of the globalised automation, media, information, and communications technology environment in Europe, over the last four decades. The conclusion is that, in the often disruptive and un co-ordinated coalescence of the publication and mass communication, telecommunications and information systems sectors, which has been a characteristic of the emergence of the global information economy, key aspects of centuries old learning about the nature of the roles and responsibilities associated with information and communications have been lost

MIGRATING BUSINESS SERVICES AND APPLICATIONS INTO THE CLOUD

Cloud computing has attracted a lot of hyperbole since it became a trendy topic for IT managers to talk about. Companiesfrequently trumpet their cloud enabled services but rarely give up details on precisely how they achieved this or how muchof their infrastructure has been fully migrated. Security and reliability of cloud services are often raised as concerns. Byunderstanding the basics of cloud computing and knowing how to assess important factors such as security and theidentification of systems that are suitable for migration, it becomes much easier to design and implement a cloud strategy.This paper provides the essential facts about the cloud computing, list some factors to prepare for when adopting cloudcomputing, consideration for managers migrating their services and applications into the cloud. It also discussed the meritsof going into the cloud.Keywords: Cloud Computing, Public Cloud, Service as a Service, Application Migration, Decision Makin

Analysis of deployment techniques for webbased applications in SMEs

The Internet is no longer just a source for accessing information; it has become a valuable medium for social networking and software services. Web-browsers can now access entire software systems available online to provide the user with a range of services. The concept of software as a service(SAAS) was born out of this. The number of development techniques and frameworks for such web-applications has grown rapidly and much research and development has been carried out on advancing the capability of web scripting languages and web browsers. However a key part of the life-cycle of web-applications that has not received adequate attention is deployment. The deployment techniques chosen to deploy a web application can have a serious affect on the cost of maintenance and the quality of service for the end user. A SAAS modelled web application attempts to emulate a desktop software package experience. If a deployment process affects the availability and quality of service of a web-application then the core concept of this model is broken. This dissertation identifies approaches to designing a deployment process and the aspects that influence the quality of a deployment technique. A survey was circulated to a number of Irish small to medium sized enterprises (SME) that develop web-based software. The survey shows an overview of multiple deployment processes used by these SMEs. Using this information, along with a review of the available literature and a detailed case study of a typical SME deploying SAAS based products, the dissertation provides a critical analysis and evaluation of the current deployment techniques being used

CLOUD COMPUTING ADOPTION FACTORS IN TURKISH LARGE SCALE ENTERPRISES

While most research regarding adoption of cloud computing by companies covers countries with highly developed IT infrastructure, cloud computing is actually used also in less IT-mature countries. Still, companies address cloud computing differently in countries with different levels of IT-maturity. This research explores cloud computing adoption factors in less IT-mature countries having Turkey as the example. Embracing an exploratory approach, we investigated five large Turkish companies. The results show that the main adoption factors in favour of cloud computing are “cost”, “distributed organisational structure”, “mobility of the employees”, and “end-user satisfaction”, while “security”, “critical business processes”, “loss of control over data and systems”, and “technical infrastructure of the region in terms of broadband” are the factors that make companies cautious about cloud computing. The main difference between Turkey and more IT-mature countries with respect to cloud computing adoption factors is inadequate broadband access and lack of knowledge on cloud computing