Review of the environmental and organisational implications of cloud computing: final report.

Cloud computing – where elastic computing resources are delivered over the Internet by external service providers – is generating significant interest within HE and FE. In the cloud computing business model, organisations or individuals contract with a cloud computing service provider on a pay-per-use basis to access data centres, application software or web services from any location. This provides an elasticity of provision which the customer can scale up or down to meet demand. This form of utility computing potentially opens up a new paradigm in the provision of IT to support administrative and educational functions within HE and FE. Further, the economies of scale and increasingly energy efficient data centre technologies which underpin cloud services means that cloud solutions may also have a positive impact on carbon footprints. In response to the growing interest in cloud computing within UK HE and FE, JISC commissioned the University of Strathclyde to undertake a Review of the Environmental and Organisational Implications of Cloud Computing in Higher and Further Education [19]

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

SLA-Oriented Resource Provisioning for Cloud Computing: Challenges, Architecture, and Solutions

Cloud computing systems promise to offer subscription-oriented, enterprise-quality computing services to users worldwide. With the increased demand for delivering services to a large number of users, they need to offer differentiated services to users and meet their quality expectations. Existing resource management systems in data centers are yet to support Service Level Agreement (SLA)-oriented resource allocation, and thus need to be enhanced to realize cloud computing and utility computing. In addition, no work has been done to collectively incorporate customer-driven service management, computational risk management, and autonomic resource management into a market-based resource management system to target the rapidly changing enterprise requirements of Cloud computing. This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural elements of SLA-oriented resource management. The proposed architecture supports integration of marketbased provisioning policies and virtualisation technologies for flexible allocation of resources to applications. The performance results obtained from our working prototype system shows the feasibility and effectiveness of SLA-based resource provisioning in Clouds.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, Conference Keynote Paper: 2011 IEEE International Conference on Cloud and Service Computing (CSC 2011, IEEE Press, USA), Hong Kong, China, December 12-14, 201

Cloud Computing in the UAE Context: An institutional perspective

This proposal seeks to understand how the local industry perceives and practices cloud computing in the UAE (United Arab Emirates) context. Despite global interest of cloud computing, no empirical study has yet examined this growing phenomenon in the UAE. Drawing from an institutional perspective, the proposal argues that the emergence of cloud computing will create isomorphic pressures and eventually urge, if not force, the local industry to reshape its IT service model. A mixed research methodology is proposed to first gain an in-depth understanding of issues faced by local companies and next survey collective perception and practice of cloud computing in the UAE as a whole. Potential implications for practitioners and researchers are discussed