The telecom operators are experiencing low revenues due to reduction in voice calls and SMS in their networks mainly driven by communication services like Skype, Google talk, msn and other VOIP (voice over internet protocol) products. Instant messaging services and social networking are also taking away the operator’s customers reducing them to “dumb pipes” with the OTT (Over the Top) players like Google, Microsoft and other content providers making profits at the expense of the operator. The growth of operators’ revenue is not keeping pace with the growth of traffic in their networks creating the perception that the content providers and OTT players do not share their revenue generated using the operator’s infrastructure. The operators are therefore increasingly being reduced to act as “dumb pipes” connecting the content generated by OTT’s with the operator’s subscribers. The operator’s revenue stream in one-sided, only coming from the subscriber usually as a flat data plan. The operator’s are looking at new revenue models and the cloud computing market is a business opportunity which allows them to monetize their network resources with the possibility to earn revenue from both the subscriber and the content providers. The communication system providers who are the communication equipment vendors to the operators are indirectly affected from the shrinking operator revenue. As part of this thesis, we address how Telco’s and system vendors can differentiate in the cloud computing market against other cloud service providers and monetize the network resources which they own. We discuss the roles in the cloud value network and activities in the value chain that could be adopted and the business opportunities they could pursue. We begin by introducing the telecom operator market and the challenges faced by the industry today. The research question we are targeting is then discussed followed by the limitations of the thesis. The lecommunication industry, cloud computing technology and the relevant service delivery models are discussed. A literature review is then done to formulate our theory. Theory on strategy by Porter, Prahalad and other researchers who have contributed to the research on cloud computing are discussed. The method adopted is then proposed. Data collected is first presented and then analyzed before discussing the results of the analysis.

Denna kandidatuppsats behandlar säkerhet inom molnet. Med hjälp av en litteraturstudie inom ämnet kombinerat med intervjuer av företag som både använder och erbjuder molntjänster undersöker vi vad företagen har för kunskap om säkerhetsbrister inom molnet. Utöver säkerhetsfrågor har vi även belyst en rad generella frågor kring molnet; varför företag använder molnet och vad de upplever som för- och nackdelar med tjänsterna. Vidare argumenterar vi för införandet av en standard som kommer att klargöra vilka säkerhetsrutiner som molnföretagen erbjuder. Uppsatsens resultat är av intresse för den som står inför ett beslut att införa molntjänster, eller den som redan använder molnet men har funderingar kring dess säkerhetsaspekter.

Implementar una arquitectura tecnológica utilizando la tecnología de prestación de servicios de Cloud Computing que soporte los proyectos profesionales de la Escuela de Ingeniería de Sistemas y Computación (EISC). / Implement a technological architecture using Cloud Computing service provision technology that supports the professional projects of the School of Engineering of Systems and Computing (EISC).

Magíster en Ingeniería de Redes de Comunicaciones / El presente trabajo tiene como objetivo general la construcción de un curso sobre el Cloud Computing con un enfoque teórico y practico, cuyo propósito principal es que los alumnos pongan en práctica los conocimientos adquiridos a través de una serie de laboratorios diseñados y correlacionados con el programa teórico, basados en las tecnologías que son tendencia en el mercado; es por ello la importancia de la opinión de especialistas en diseño de nubes y manejo de negocios para la realización de este trabajo. El material de estudios propuesto viene a sellar el vacío práctico que existe en la oferta nacional e internacional en cuanto al estudio de tecnologías relacionadas a las construcción de nubes públicas y privadas, es por ello que se establece un punto de referencia en cuanto al temario propuesto por la industria en certificaciones de las tecnologías de información más relevantes y a los cursos universitarios relacionados al tema. Además se incluye como parte del curso, el estudio de la arquitectura y uso de un sistema operativo para nubes de código abierto, llamado OpenStack, como introducción a los alumnos interesados en el desarrollo de aplicaciones específicas sobre este sistema operativo. Se hace énfasis en el estudio de OpenStack debido a su relevancia e importancia en el mercado, así como también su uso referencial para muchos fabricantes de equipos de data centers y software de virtualización. Dicho lo anterior, el presente trabajo propone un enfoque completo a nivel técnico en el diseño de nubes, con matices de modelos de negocios en el Cloud Computing, lo cual es relevante al momento de entender el porqué del uso de esta tecnología, además de entender los beneficios más relevantes en la adopción de tecnologías basadas en la nube. De forma implícita el presente trabajo tiene como meta romper la barrera de conocimientos y relacionamiento que existe entre el personal de los departamentos de virtualización, software, redes y almacenamiento de las empresas, cuya estructura en la mayoría de los casos, presenta un reto al momento de la implementación de tecnologías que cada vez están mas relacionadas entre sí y que deben convivir con un punto de gestión centralizado.

The aim of this diploma thesis called "Cloud services utilization at Czech universities" is to compare services of Office 365 and G Suite and to evaluate their use at public universities in the Czech Republic which is examined on the basis of qualitative research. The thesis contains six parts. The first chapter characterizes the concept of cloud, its advantages, disadvantages and its models: delivery models and deployment models. The second and third parts describe the history and pricing plans of Office 365 and G Suite. Selected services for education plans are described and then compared from the schools' point of view within the fourth chapter. The fifth part focuses on the experience of cloud services (Microsoft or Google) at selected universities in the Czech Republic with the aim of identifying impulses, barriers, experiences, ideas and recommendations which could serve other colleges and which are summarized in the final part.

MapReduce, a parallel computing paradigm, has been gaining popularity in recent years as cloud vendors offer MapReduce computation services on their public clouds. However, companies are still reluctant to move their computations to the public cloud due to the following reason: In the current business model, the entire MapReduce cluster is deployed on the public cloud. If the public cloud is not properly protected, the integrity and the confidentiality of MapReduce applications can be compromised by attacks inside or outside of the public cloud. From the result integrity’s perspective, if any computation nodes on the public cloud are compromised,thosenodes can return incorrect task results and therefore render the final job result inaccurate. From the algorithmic confidentiality’s perspective, when more and more companies devise innovative algorithms and deploy them to the public cloud, malicious attackers can reverse engineer those programs to detect the algorithmic details and, therefore, compromise the intellectual property of those companies. In this dissertation, we propose to use the hybrid cloud architecture to defeat the above two threats. Based on the hybrid cloud architecture, we propose separate solutions to address the result integrity and the algorithmic confidentiality problems. To address the result integrity problem, we propose the Integrity Assurance MapReduce (IAMR) framework. IAMR performs the result checking technique to guarantee high result accuracy of MapReduce jobs, even if the computation is executed on an untrusted public cloud. We implemented a prototype system for a real hybrid cloud environment and performed a series of experiments. Our theoretical simulations and experimental results show that IAMR can guarantee a very low job error rate, while maintaining a moderate performance overhead. To address the algorithmic confidentiality problem, we focus on the program control flow and propose the Confidentiality Assurance MapReduce (CAMR) framework. CAMR performs the Runtime Control Flow Obfuscation (RCFO) technique to protect the predicates of MapReduce jobs. We implemented a prototype system for a real hybrid cloud environment. The security analysis and experimental results show that CAMR defeats static analysis-based reverse engineering attacks, raises the bar for the dynamic analysis-based reverse engineering attacks, and incurs a modest performance overhead.

Technology enables progress for individuals and organisations; however, adopting technology may not always be simple. Cloud computing technology has revolutionised how one consumes IT. Governments too can leverage the advantages of adopting cloud computing. A review of the literature reveals a gap in research on the adoption of cloud computing by the South African public sector. Limited research has been done on the topic of cloud computing and none of them are from a quantitative perspective. This study set out to answer the question, “What is the extent (current state, benefits, barriers and readiness levels) of the adoption of cloud computing by the South Africa public sector?” The study is of much value to the public sector of South Africa and other countries and organisations wanting to understand what to consider when adopting cloud computing. The study used a survey research strategy that was exploratory in nature. The sample comprised government CIO’s and government Senior IT management. Questionnaires were sent via a web link and 51 responses were completed. The results revealed that more than half of the South African public sector has adopted cloud computing; however there is a lack of visibility of government initiatives that promote cloud computing. The study shows that public organisations that have adopted cloud computing significantly perceive more benefits of cloud computing than organisations that are yet to adopt. The Technology Organisation Environment (TOE) framework tested the barriers to adoption, revealing areas of concern that are limiting successful cloud computing adoption and adoption rates. The study uncovers a timeline for further cloud computing adoption in the South African public sector.

We present an architecture for a fully decentralized peer-to-peer collaborative computing platform, offering services similar to Cloud Service Provider’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model, using volunteered resources rather than dedicated resources. This thesis is motivated by three research questions: (1) Is it possible to build a peer-to-peer col- laborative system using a fully decentralized infrastructure relying only on volunteered resources?, (2) How can light virtualization be used to mitigate the complexity inherent to the volunteered resources?, and (3) What are the minimal requirements for a computing platform similar to the PaaS cloud computing platform? We propose an architecture composed of three layers: the Network layer, the Virtual layer, and the Application layer. We also propose to use light virtualization technologies, or containers, to provide a uniform abstraction of the contributing resources and to isolate the host environment from the contributed environment. Then, we propose a minimal API specification for this computing platform, which is also applicable to PaaS computing platforms. The findings of this thesis corroborate the hypothesis that peer-to-peer collaborative systems can be used as a basis for developing volunteer cloud computing infrastructures. We outline the implications of using light virtualization as an integral virtualization primitive in public distributed computing platform. Finally, this thesis lays out a starting point for most volunteer cloud computing infrastructure development effort, because it circumscribes the essential requirements and presents solutions to mitigate the complexities inherent to this paradigm.

Data centres and other infrastructures in the field of information technology suffer from the major issue of ‘server sprawl’, a term used to depict the situation wherein a number of servers consume resources inefficiently, when compared to the business value of outcome obtained from them. Consolidation of servers, rather than dedicating whole servers to individual applications, optimizes the usage of hardware resources, and virtualization achieves this by allowing multiple servers to share a single hardware platform. Server virtualization is facilitated by the usage of hypervisors, among which Xen is widely preferred because of its dual virtualization modes, virtual machine migration support and scalability. This research work involves an analysis of the CPU scheduling algorithms incorporated into Xen, on the basis of the algorithm’s performance in different workload scenarios. In addition to performance evaluation, the results obtained lay emphasis on the importance of compute intensive or I/O intensive domain handling capacity of a hypervisor’s CPU scheduling algorithm in virtualized server environments. Based on this knowledge, the selection of CPU scheduler in a hypervisor can be aligned with the requirements of the hosted applications. A new credit-based VCPU scheduling scheme is proposed, in which the credits remaining for each VCPU after every accounting period plays a significant role in the scheduling decision. The proposed scheduling strategy allows those VCPUs of I/O intensive domains to supersede others, in order to favour the reduction of I/O bound domain response times and the subsequent bottleneck in the CPU run queue. Though a small percentage of context switch overhead is introduced, the results indicate substantial improvement of I/O handling and fairness in re-source allocation between the host and guest domains.

Cloud computing Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) has gained momentum in the cloud computing research field due to its ability to provide efficient infrastructures. Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) are striving to offer Quality of Service (QoS)-guaranteed IaaS services while also improving their resource utilization and maximizing profit. In addition, CSPs are challenged by the need to manipulate diverse and heterogeneous resources, realizing multiple objectives for both customers and CSPs, and handling scalability issues. These challenges are the motivations behind this work which aims at developing a multi-layered framework for constructing and managing efficient IaaS. The fundamental layer in this framework, the Virtual Infrastructure (VI) composition layer, is dedicated to composing and delivering VIs as an IaaS service. This framework relies on a preparatory step that is defined when all the available resources in the managed space are collected in a large repository, the Virtual Resource Pool (VRP). The VRP creation process unifies the representation of all the diverse and heterogeneous resources available. Subsequently, the proposed framework performs various resource allocation approaches as working solutions through the VI composition layer. These approaches adopt efficient techniques and methodologies in performing their operations. The working solutions are initiated by designing a composition approach that relies on an ontology-based model representation. The composition approach exploits semantic similarity, closeness centrality, and random walk techniques for efficient resource allocation. As a result, it provides an efficient solution in a reasonable computational time with no guarantee for the optimality of the obtained solutions. To achieve an optimal solution, the composition approach uses a mathematical modeling formulation. In this solution, the concepts of the composition approach have been integrated into a multi-objective Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model that has been solved optimally. Despite the optimality of the resulting solution, the MILP-based model restricts IaaS resource allocation to a computational running-time challenge, and the issue of limited-size datacenters. To circumvent these issues, a cost-efficient model is proposed. The new model introduces a Column Generation (CG) formulation for the IaaS resource allocation problem in large datacenters acquainted with QoS requirements. Furthermore, this formulation is realistic, adopts large-scale optimization tools that are adequate for large datacenters, and ensures optimal solutions in a reasonable time. However, growing costs in large datacenters in accordance with the growth of recent large-scale application demands, makes large datacenters economically inefficient. Thus, we advocate a distributed framework for IaaS provisioning that guarantees affordable, scalable, and QoS-assured infrastructure for hosting large-scale applications in geo-distributed datacenters. The framework incorporates two decentralized resource allocation approaches, hierarchical and distributed, that use efficient economic models. These approaches are quite promising solutions for the scalability and computational complexity issues of existing centralized approaches. Finally, the cost-efficient model has been extended to fit the distributed infrastructure by considering additional constraints that impact CSP revenue. Simulation results showcase the effectiveness of the presented work along with the potential benefits of the proposed solutions in terms of satisfying the customers’ requirements, while achieving a better resource utilization and CSP payoffs.