Cloud Migration: A Case Study of Migrating an Enterprise IT System to IaaS

This case study illustrates the potential benefits and risks associated with the migration of an IT system in the oil & gas industry from an in-house data center to Amazon EC2 from a broad variety of stakeholder perspectives across the enterprise, thus transcending the typical, yet narrow, financial and technical analysis offered by providers. Our results show that the system infrastructure in the case study would have cost 37% less over 5 years on EC2, and using cloud computing could have potentially eliminated 21% of the support calls for this system. These findings seem significant enough to call for a migration of the system to the cloud but our stakeholder impact analysis revealed that there are significant risks associated with this. Whilst the benefits of using the cloud are attractive, we argue that it is important that enterprise decision-makers consider the overall organizational implications of the changes brought about with cloud computing to avoid implementing local optimizations at the cost of organization-wide performance.Comment: Submitted to IEEE CLOUD 201

The metabolism of progesterone

Section I. General Introduction • • Section II. Method for the Quantitative Determination of small amounts of Pregnanediol in Human Urine • • Section III. Rapid Method for the Determination of Urinary Pregnanediol suitable for routine clinical use • • Section IV. The Conversion of Progesterone to Urinary Pregnanediol by Human Subjects: Introduction • (1) Healthy Post -Menopausal Women • (2) Healthy Young Men • (3) Oestrogen pretreated Post-Menopausal Women • (4) Hysterectomised Post-Menopausal Women • (5) Hypertensive Cases • (6) Administration of Pregnanediol or Sodium pregnanediol glucuronidate • (7) Continued Daily Administration of Progesterone to Post-Menopausal Women and Young Men • • Section V. Effect of Administration of Progesterone on Excretion of Pregnanediol during Normal Pregnancy • • Section VI. Excretion of Urinary Pregnanediol after Excision of the Corpus Luteum of Pregnancy • • Section VII. Effect of Diethylstilboestrol Administration on Excretion of Pregnanediol in Normal and Diabetic Pregnancy • • Section VIII. Interpretation • • References • • Publication

Report and commentary on the following six cases: 1. Squamous epithelioma of maxillary sinus. 2. Squamous epithelioma of mandible. 3. Recurrent sq.epith. of tongue. 4. Recurrent sq.eapillomata of tongue with syphilitic glossitis and leucoplakia. 5. Recurrent squamous epithelioma of tonsil. 6. Leucoplakia and recurrent squamous epithelioma of vulva: Pattison Prize in Clinical Surgery, 1946

The cases in the Report, by illustrating a series of definite aetioloical factors, suggest a line of attack not usually available in the treatment of neoplasms, namely, prophylaxis.Adequate treatment and follow up of cases of a Syphilitic Globsitis; early recognition and treatment of Buccal Leukoplakia (and especially of Leukoplakia Vulvae); the avoidance of prolonged dental trauma and serious consideration of resultant "simple" ulceration; the recognition of treatment of nutritional anaemia, all these may reduce the incidence of Succal Carcinoma despite the ever increasing number of candidates in an ageing population

Decision Support Tools for Cloud Migration in the Enterprise

This paper describes two tools that aim to support decision making during the migration of IT systems to the cloud. The first is a modeling tool that produces cost estimates of using public IaaS clouds. The tool enables IT architects to model their applications, data and infrastructure requirements in addition to their computational resource usage patterns. The tool can be used to compare the cost of different cloud providers, deployment options and usage scenarios. The second tool is a spreadsheet that outlines the benefits and risks of using IaaS clouds from an enterprise perspective; this tool provides a starting point for risk assessment. Two case studies were used to evaluate the tools. The tools were useful as they informed decision makers about the costs, benefits and risks of using the cloud.Comment: To appear in IEEE CLOUD 201

Academic Cloud Computing Research: Five Pitfalls and Five Opportunities

This discussion paper argues that there are five fundamental pitfalls, which can restrict academics from conducting cloud computing research at the infrastructure level, which is currently where the vast majority of academic research lies. Instead academics should be conducting higher risk research, in order to gain understanding and open up entirely new areas. We call for a renewed mindset and argue that academic research should focus less upon physical infrastructure and embrace the abstractions provided by clouds through five opportunities: user driven research, new programming models, PaaS environments, and improved tools to support elasticity and large-scale debugging. The objective of this paper is to foster discussion, and to define a roadmap forward, which will allow academia to make longer-term impacts to the cloud computing community.Comment: Accepted and presented at the 6th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud'14

Responsibility Modeling for the Sociotechnical Risk Analysis of Coalitions of Systems

Society is challenging systems engineers by demanding ever more complex and integrated systems. With the rise of cloud computing and systems-of-systems (including cyber-physical systems) we are entering an era where mission critical services and applications will be dependent upon 'coalitions-of-systems'. Coalitions-of-systems (CoS) are a class of system similar to systems-of-systems but they differ in that they interact to further overlapping self-interests rather than an overarching mission. Assessing the sociotechnical risks associated with CoS is an open research question of societal importance as existing risk analysis techniques typically focus on the technical aspects of systems and ignore risks associated with coalition partners reneging on responsibilities or leaving the coalition. We demonstrate that a responsibility modeling based risk analysis approach enables the identification of sociotechnical risks associated with CoS. The approach identifies hazards and associated risks that may arise when relying upon a coalition of human/organizational/technical agents to provision a service or application. Through a case study of a proposed cloud IT infrastructure migration we show how the technique identifies vulnerabilities that may arise because of human, organizational or technical agents failing to discharge responsibilities.Comment: Submitted for consideration for the IEEE SMC2011 conferenc