Intercloud Resource Discovery: A Future Perspective using Blockchain Technology

Intercloud is a single logical entity orchestrating resources from different individual clouds providing on-demand resource provisioning in a seamless manner. However, achieving efficient resource discovery in the intercloud environment remains a challenging task owing to the heterogeneity of resources and diversity of cloud platforms. The paper briefs about intercloud resource discovery, outlines the current work done using existing approaches and examines the challenges involved. Finally, the paper explains the concept of blockchain and presents an innovative conceptual model for efficient resource discovery in intercloud

The adoption of cloud computing by SMEs: identifying and coping with external factors.

Comunicação apresentada na CAPSI 2011 - 11ª Conferência da Associação Portuguesa de Sistemas de Informação – A Gestão de Informação na era da Cloud Computing, Lisboa, ISEG/IUL-ISCTE/, 19 a 21 de Outubro de 2011.The recent development of Cloud Computing (CC) provides a convincing opportunity for organizations to outsource their Information and Communications Technology (ICT). Although its popularity is increasing rapidly, there are concerns that must be taken into account. This paper ascertains the most relevant issues associated with the political, economic, social and technological factors concerning CC adoption. The research described is based on a scoping review to identify relevant studies published in the literature recently. The aim is to provide an overview of the most recent findings in the Cloud Computing environment, which can inform strategic decision-making by Small to Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) in this area

A Survey of Resource Management Challenges in Multi-cloud Environment: Taxonomy and Empirical Analysis

Cloud computing has seen a great deal of interest by researchers and industrial firms since its first coined. Different perspectives and research problems, such as energy efficiency, security and threats, to name but a few, have been dealt with and addressed from cloud computing perspective. However, cloud computing environment still encounters a major challenge of how to allocate and manage computational resources efficiently. Furthermore, due to the different architectures and cloud computing networks and models used (i.e., federated clouds, VM migrations, cloud brokerage), the complexity of resource management in the cloud has been increased dramatically. Cloud providers and service consumers have the cloud brokers working as the intermediaries between them, and the confusion among the cloud computing parties (consumers, brokers, data centres and service providers) on who is responsible for managing the request of cloud resources is a key issue. In a traditional scenario, upon renting the various cloud resources from the providers, the cloud brokers engage in subletting and managing these resources to the service consumers. However, providers’ usually deal with many brokers, and vice versa, and any dispute of any kind between the providers and the brokers will lead to service unavailability, in which the consumer is the only victim. Therefore, managing cloud resources and services still needs a lot of attention and effort. This paper expresses the survey on the systems of the cloud brokerage resource management issues in multi-cloud environments

Health Access Broker: Secure, Patient-Controlled Management of Personal Health Records in the Cloud

Secure and privacy-preserving management of Personal Health Records (PHRs) has proved to be a major challenge in modern healthcare. Current solutions generally do not offer patients a choice in where the data is actually stored and also rely on at least one fully trusted element that patients must also trust with their data. In this work, we present the Health Access Broker (HAB), a patient-controlled service for secure PHR sharing that (a) does not impose a specific storage location (uniquely for a PHR system), and (b) does not assume any of its components to be fully secure against adversarial threats. Instead, HAB introduces a novel auditing and intrusion-detection mechanism where its workflow is securely logged and continuously inspected to provide auditability of data access and quickly detect any intrusions.Comment: Copy of the paper accepted at 13th International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Security for Information Systems (CISIS

Cloud Service Brokerage: A systematic literature review using a software development lifecycle

Cloud Service Brokerage (CSB) is an emerging technology that has become popular with cloud computing. CSB is a middleman providing value added services, developed using standard software development lifecycle, from cloud providers to consumers. This paper provides a systematic literature review on this topic, covering 41 publications from 2009 to 2015. The paper aims to provide an overview of CSB research status, and give suggestions on how CSB research should proceed. A descriptive analysis reveals a lack of contributions from the Information Systems discipline. A software development lifecycle analysis uncovers a severe imbalance of research contributions across the four stages of software development: design, develop, deploy, and manage. The majority of research contributions are geared toward the design stage with a minimal contribution in the remaining stages. As such, we call for a balanced research endeavor across the cycle given the equal importance of each stage within the CSB paradigm

Profit Driven Decision Assist System to Select Efficient IaaS Providers

IaaS providers provide infrastructure to the end users with various pricing schemes and models. They provide different types of virtual machines (small, medium, large, etc.). Since each IaaS provider uses their own pricing schemes and models, price varies from one provider to the other for the same requirements. To select a best IaaS provider, the end users need to consider various parameters such as SLA, pricing models/schemes, VM heterogeneity, etc. Since many parameters are involved, selecting an efficient IaaS provider is a challenging job for an end user. To address this issue, in this work we have designed, implemented and tested a decision-assist system which assists the end users to select efficient IaaS provider(s). Our decision-assist system consists of an analytical model to calculate the cost and decision strategies to assist the end user in selecting the efficient IaaS provider(s). The decision assist system considers various relevant parameters such as VM configuration, price, availability, etc. to decide the efficient IaaS provider(s). Rigorous experiments have been conducted by emulating various IaaS providers, and we have observed that our DAS successfully suggests the efficient IaaS provider/ providers by considering the input parameters given by the user