Using Open Standards for Interoperability - Issues, Solutions, and Challenges facing Cloud Computing

Virtualization offers several benefits for optimal resource utilization over traditional non-virtualized server farms. With improvements in internetworking technologies and increase in network bandwidth speeds, a new era of computing has been ushered in, that of grids and clouds. With several commercial cloud providers coming up, each with their own APIs, application description formats, and varying support for SLAs, vendor lock-in has become a serious issue for end users. This article attempts to describe the problem, issues, possible solutions and challenges in achieving cloud interoperability. These issues will be analyzed in the ambit of the European project Contrail that is trying to adopt open standards with available virtualization solutions to enhance users' trust in the clouds by attempting to prevent vendor lock-ins, supporting and enforcing SLAs together with adequate data protection for sensitive data

Managing as Designing: Transforming Digital Healthcare Interoperability

Digital healthcare transformations promise improved overall quality healthcare and patient continued care among others. However, quality healthcare and continued patient care can be hampered by various challenges including insufficient collaboration among healthcare centers, and limited data exchanges between health information systems (HIS). Such challenges can be overcome through collaborative digital healthcare initiatives in which, HIS are designed with data exchange capabilities that enable healthcare centers to easily exchange patient information across boundaries. However, several existing initiatives are carried out in isolation, and there is limited practical knowledge on how to collaboratively manage and design HIS’ interoperability. Consequently, this study investigated a managing as designing (MaD) approach taken by a successful HIS interoperability initiative in Sweden. Data was collected mainly through interviews with key informants within the implementation team. Based on study findings, a MaD HIS-interoperability conceptual framework that can guide the management and design of future HIS’ interoperability was developed

Putting Interoperability on Health-information-systems’ Implementation Agenda

The increasing demand of past patient medical information at the point of care, creates new data sharing and exchange demands on health information systems (HIS). However, a number of existing HIS have data exchange challenges given that they are ordinarily designed as vertical silos without interoperability obligations. Yet, to have data exchange within HIS and across health facilities, participating systems ought to be interoperable. However, interoperability is usually not considered a key design requirement during HIS implementations. Therefore, relying on exceptional existing practices to create benchmark design knowledge, the author employs a sense making perspective to analyze how HIS implementers arrive at their interoperability design requirements. Through this approach, an initial set of interoperability design prerequisites for purposively designing HIS’ interoperability is proposed. These include: knowing who, knowing what, knowing how and knowing which. A further study implication is the use of a sense-making perspective in exploring system design requirements

An improved port knocking authentication framework for mobile cloud computing

The latest developments in mobile cloud computing (MCC) have changed user's priorities for computing. However, the change towards MCC brings new challenges to cloud service providers and administrators. Authentication is one among the challenges categorized in the classification of security issues for MCC. Port knocking authentication method eliminates user's collaboration during the authentication process. Thus, such technique has the potential to be applied on the MCC environment which can ensure reliable communication. However, current port knocking authentication techniques lack of addressing the issue of knock-sequence length. It is challenging to deploy appropriate length sequence for port knocking authentication for the reason that shorter length knock sequence degrades security, whereas, deploying longer length sequence involves performance issues in terms of time and buffer management. This paper proposes a dynamic length port knocking authentication framework which addresses the issue of security degradation and optimizes performance in terms of time up and buffer managment. We employ MikroTik RouterOS for the evaluation of the proposed technique. Analysis of the results shows that dynamic length port knocking authentication technique improves performance in terms of time up to 23% and buffer management up to 28% by reducing the imposed load. Furthermore, by deploying dynamic length (DL) and pool of length (PoL), the proposed method reveals high security, which decreases the probability of hacking knock-sequence near to zero for a number of parallel authentication requests. Hence, dynamic length port knocking authentication technique provides an optimal solution for reliable communication in MCC

Multi-Cloud Portable Application Deployment with VEP

Leveraging the plethora of available Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions proves to be a hard task for users who should face the complexity of dealing with heterogeneous systems, either in terms of resources or APIs. Application portability is the mean to reduce the burden of adapting applications for specific IaaS types and escape po-tential vendor lock-in. The Virtual Execution Platform (VEP) is a cloud middleware software that interfaces multiple IaaS clouds and presents end-users with an interface facilitating deployment and life cycle man-agement of distributed applications made up of several inter-networked virtual machines. This paper presents the design of VEP and experi-mental results that evaluate its scalability in deploying applications on OpenNebula and OpenStack clouds

Cloud Providers Viability: How to Address it from an IT and Legal Perspective?

A major part of the commercial Internet is moving towards a cloud paradigm. This phenomenon has a drastic impact on the organizational structures of enterprises and introduces new challenges that must be properly addressed to avoid major setbacks. One such challenge is that of cloud provider viability, that is, the reasonable certainty that the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) will not go out of business, either by filing for bankruptcy or by simply shutting down operations, thus leaving its customers stranded without an infrastructure and, depending on the type of cloud service used, even without their applications or data. This article attempts to address the issue of cloud provider viability, proposing some ways of mitigating the problem both from a technical and from a legal perspective