875 research outputs found
On the Economics of Cloud Markets
Cloud computing is a paradigm that has the potential to transform and
revolutionalize the next generation IT industry by making software available to
end-users as a service. A cloud, also commonly known as a cloud network,
typically comprises of hardware (network of servers) and a collection of
softwares that is made available to end-users in a pay-as-you-go manner.
Multiple public cloud providers (ex., Amazon) co-existing in a cloud computing
market provide similar services (software as a service) to its clients, both in
terms of the nature of an application, as well as in quality of service (QoS)
provision. The decision of whether a cloud hosts (or finds it profitable to
host) a service in the long-term would depend jointly on the price it sets, the
QoS guarantees it provides to its customers, and the satisfaction of the
advertised guarantees. In this paper, we devise and analyze three
inter-organizational economic models relevant to cloud networks. We formulate
our problems as non co-operative price and QoS games between multiple cloud
providers existing in a cloud market. We prove that a unique pure strategy Nash
equilibrium (NE) exists in two of the three models. Our analysis paves the path
for each cloud provider to 1) know what prices and QoS level to set for
end-users of a given service type, such that the provider could exist in the
cloud market, and 2) practically and dynamically provision appropriate capacity
for satisfying advertised QoS guarantees.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figure
Pricing and Investments in Internet Security: A Cyber-Insurance Perspective
Internet users such as individuals and organizations are subject to different
types of epidemic risks such as worms, viruses, spams, and botnets. To reduce
the probability of risk, an Internet user generally invests in traditional
security mechanisms like anti-virus and anti-spam software, sometimes also
known as self-defense mechanisms. However, such software does not completely
eliminate risk. Recent works have considered the problem of residual risk
elimination by proposing the idea of cyber-insurance. In this regard, an
important research problem is the analysis of optimal user self-defense
investments and cyber-insurance contracts under the Internet environment. In
this paper, we investigate two problems and their relationship: 1) analyzing
optimal self-defense investments in the Internet, under optimal cyber-insurance
coverage, where optimality is an insurer objective and 2) designing optimal
cyber-insurance contracts for Internet users, where a contract is a (premium,
coverage) pair
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