IT professionals must constantly ensure the integrity and availability of their services. One aspect to monitor is the physical environment surrounding their equipment. Factors such as high temperature, humidity or water leaks can all contribute to costly downtime. There are a variety of solutions for monitoring these factors but those which can make their data universally available are of particular interest. The more cost- effective alternatives on the market are found as embedded devices with integrated web servers. The drawbacks of these systems have been their resource limitations as well as the need for complex configuration to make their data available from any location. A solution based in the cloud could remove the resource constraints of embedded systems and easily achieve widespread availability. This report presents Cerberus, a cloud-based environmental data aggregator that allows web server based devices to bypass their limitations and the necessary configuration to achieve widespread availability. It was implemented using two distinct cloud platforms and has been in active use for several months. Cerberus allows for environment monitors to push their data in as little as 250 ms while allowing for dynamic scaling as needed. The application provides all the necessary functionality such as alarm v generation, data visualization and archiving. The following presents the conception, design, implementation and future extensions to Cerberus as well as a comparative study of different cloud-based hosting services. / text

A point-of-sale (POS) system is a transaction system allowing retail transactions to be completed. The purpose of this degree project was to examine the potential benefits and risks of implementing a POS as a cloud-based application in comparison to a traditional on-site POS solution. The main focus of this project was put on identifying the benefits and possibilities of using a cloud solution but effort was also geared towards exploring the functionality of an existing web-based POS prototype as a cloud client. A further aspect of this project was to address some of the problems associated with the use of peripheral equipment while maintaining a thin client. This has been achieved by studying cloud computing theory in modern day literature, analysing and working with traditional POS solutions and doing hands-on testing with peripheral equipment. The project results supports the notion that a cloud based POS solution is not only feasible but may perhaps provide some benefits in comparison to a traditional POS solution. However, great care must be taken, both to avoid vendor lock-in and in designing a cloud based system to allow continued operation of client and eventu-al peripheral equipment in an Internet Service Provider (ISP) or Cloud Service Provider (CSP) outage situation. / Ett Point-of-sale (POS) system är ett system som möjliggör fullförande av transaktioner. Syftet med detta examensarbetet var att undersöka möjliga fördelar och risker med att implementera ett POS system som en molnbaserad applikation i jämförelse med en traditionell POS lösning. Huvudfokus lades på att identifiera de fördelar och möjligheter en molnlösning medför men arbete riktades även mot att utforska funktionaliteten hos en existerade webbaserad POS prototyp i rollen som molnklient för detta projekt. En ytterligare aspekt var att adressera några av de problem som associeras med användandet av tredjeparts periferiutrustning tillsammans med en tunn klient. Detta har gjorts genom att studera cloud computing i modern litteratur, analysera och arbeta med traditionella POS lösningar och genom praktisk testning av periferiutrustning. Projektets slutsatser stödjer iden att en molnbaserad POS inte bara är genomförbart utan kan under vissa förhållanden medföra vissa fördelar gentemot en traditionell POS. Men, viss eftertänksamhet är på sin plats vid övervägandet att bygga och använda ett molnbaserat system för att garantera fortsatt operation av klient och periferiutrustning vid förlorad kontakt med internetleverantör och/eller molntjänstleverantör.

El presente estudio se trazó como propósito, determinar la influencia que tiene del uso de la tecnología Cloud Computing en la reducción de costos y agilidad de la gestión de procesos administrativos (G.P.A) de la empresa ABCGas, S.A., en la ciudad de Lima, Perú. La metodología utilizada fue el método científico, se aplicaron diferentes técnicas de recolección de datos como lo fueron la observación directa y dos encuestas con preguntas que abordaron el tema, para demostrar la hipótesis: El uso de la tecnología Cloud Computing influye en la reducción de costos y en la agilidad de la gestión de procesos administrativos de la empresa ABCGas, S.A. Siendo la población del estudio de 52 empleados y la muestra de 30 individuos que son los principales usuarios del sistema, al realizar la comparación de los datos que arrojaron las encuestas, antes y después de la implementación de la tecnología Cloud Computing, se pueden observar las mejoras en todos las variables estudiadas, por lo que se establece que esta tecnología tiene influencia en la G.P.A. Además de esto, se evaluaron los costos fijos de la organización y la inversión realizada al migrar de SAP Empresarial a Cloud Computing. La migración resulto en una disminución en los gastos fijos de la misma al implementar el nuevo sistema, por otro lado, permite la reducción tiempo y esfuerzo en los centros de cómputo de la gestión antes mencionada, agilizando cada uno de estos, así como reducir los costos de mantenimiento de hardware y software utilizados.

Le « Cloud brokering » est un paradigme de service qui fournit interopérabilité et portabilité des applications à travers plusieurs fournisseurs de Cloud. Les nouveaux services et capacités étendues qui améliorent ou complètent celles déjà offertes par les fournisseurs de Cloud sont la caractéristique principale des « Cloud brokers ». Actuellement, d’un point de vue de l’infrastructure Cloud, les Cloud brokers jouent un rôle d’agents intermédiaires entre les utilisateurs et les fournisseurs, agissant ainsi comme un point commun pour la consommation des services Cloud. Parmi les avantages les plus notables liés à ce point d’accès commun on trouve : l’augmentation de la résilience en allouant l’infrastructure chez de multiples fournisseurs ; la délivrance d’une facturation unifiée ; la simplification des processus de gouvernance ; l’approvisionnement et le règlement à travers de multiples fournisseurs. Dans le futur, les Cloud brokers fourniront des services avancés de valeur ajoutée et vendront des services Cloud en utilisant d’attractives politiques de prix. Le but de cette thèse est de proposer deux services avancés de valeur ajoutée et une politique de prix pour les Cloud brokers / Cloud brokering is a service paradigm that provides interoperability and portability of applications across multiple Cloud providers. The attractiveness of Cloud brokering relies on the new services and extended computing facilities that enhance or complement those already offered by isolated Cloud providers. These services provide new value to Small and Medium-sized Businesses (SMBs) and large enterprises and make Cloud providers more competitive. Nowadays, at the infrastructure level, Cloud brokers act as an intermediary between the end-users and the Cloud providers. A Cloud broker provides a single point for service consumption in order to avoid vendor lock-in, increase application resilience, provide a unified billing, and simplify governance, procurement and settlement processes across multiple Cloud providers. In the future, Cloud brokers will provide advanced valueadded services and will use attractive pricing models to capture potential Cloud consumers. The aim of this thesis is to propose advanced value-added services and a pricing model for Cloud brokers.

Cloud computing has grown largely over the past three years and is widely popular amongst today's IT landscape. In a comparative study between 250 IT decision makers of UK companies they said, that they already use cloud services for 61% of their systems. Cloud vendors promise "infinite scalability and resources" combined with on-demand access from everywhere. This lets cloud users quickly forget, that there is still a real IT infrastructure behind a cloud. Due to virtualization and multi-tenancy the complexity of these infrastructures is even increased compared to traditional data centers, while it is hidden from the user and outside of his control. This makes management of service provisioning, monitoring, backup, disaster recovery and especially security more complicated. Due to this, and a number of severe security incidents at commercial providers in recent years there is a growing lack of trust in cloud infrastructures. This thesis presents research on cloud security challenges and how they can be addressed by cloud security audits. Security requirements of an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud are identified and it is shown how they differ from traditional data centres. To address cloud specific security challenges, a new cloud audit criteria catalogue is developed. Subsequently, a novel cloud security audit system gets developed, which provides a flexible audit architecture for frequently changing cloud infrastructures. It is based on lightweight software agents, which monitor key events in a cloud and trigger specific targeted security audits on demand - on a customer and a cloud provider perspective. To enable these concurrent cloud audits, a Cloud Audit Policy Language is developed and integrated into the audit architecture. Furthermore, to address advanced cloud specific security challenges, an anomaly detection system based on machine learning technology is developed. By creating cloud usage profiles, a continuous evaluation of events - customer specific as well as customer overspanning - helps to detect anomalies within an IaaS cloud. The feasibility of the research is presented as a prototype and its functionality is presented in three demonstrations. Results prove, that the developed cloud audit architecture is able to mitigate cloud specific security challenges.

Cloud Computing is an emerging new computing paradigm which is developed out of service-orientation, grid computing, parallel computing, utility computing, autonomic computing, and virtualization paradigms. Both industry and academia have experienced its rapid growth and are exploring full usage of its potentials to maintain their services provided to customers and partners. In this context, a key aspect to investigate is how to architect or design cloud-based application that meet various system requirements of customers’ needs. In this thesis, we have applied the systematic literature review method to explore the main concerns when architecting for the cloud. We have identified, classified, and extracted existing approaches and solutions for specific concerns based on the existing research articles that focus on planning and providing cloud architecture or design for different concerns and needs. The main contribution of the thesis is a catalogued architecture solutions for managing specific concerns when architecting for the cloud.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Data and information have increased exponentially in recent years. The promising era of big data is advancing many new practices. One of the emerging big data applications is healthcare. Large quantities of data with varying complexities have been leading to a great need in smart and secure big data systems. Mobile edge, more specifically the smart phone, is a natural source of big data and is ubiquitous in our daily lives. Smartphones offer a variety of sensors, which make them a very valuable source of data that can be used for analysis. Since this data is coming directly from personal phones, that means the generated data is sensitive and must be handled in a smart and secure way. In addition to generating data, it is also important to interact with the big data. Therefore, it is critical to create edge systems that enable users to access their data and ensure that these applications are smart and secure. As the first major contribution of this thesis, we have implemented a mobile edge system, called s2Edge. This edge system leverages Amazon Web Service (AWS) security features and is backed by an AWS cloud system. The implemented mobile application securely logs in, signs up, and signs out users, as well as connects users to the vast amounts of data they generate. With a high interactive capability, the system allows users (like patients) to retrieve and view their data and records, as well as communicate with the cloud users (like physicians). The resulting mobile edge system is promising and is expected to demonstrate the potential of smart and secure big data interaction. The smart and secure transmission and management of the big data on the cloud is essential for healthcare big data, including both patient information and patient measurements. The second major contribution of this thesis is to demonstrate a novel big data cloud system, s2Cloud, which can help enhance healthcare systems to better monitor patients and give doctors critical insights into their patients' health. s2Cloud achieves big data security through secure sign up and log in for the doctors, as well as data transmission protection. The system allows the doctors to manage both patients and their records effectively. The doctors can add and edit the patient and record information through the interactive website. Furthermore, the system supports both real-time and historical modes for big data management. Therefore, the patient measurement information can, not only be visualized and demonstrated in real-time, but also be retrieved for further analysis. The smart website also allows doctors and patients to interact with each other effectively through instantaneous chat. Overall, the proposed s2Cloud system, empowered by smart secure design innovations, has demonstrated the feasibility and potential for healthcare big data applications. This study will further broadly benefit and advance other smart home and world big data applications. / 2023-06-01

Typescript, etc. / Digitized by Kansas State University Libraries

Online hosed services are what is referred to as Cloud Computing. Access to these services is via the internet. h shifts the traditional IT resource ownership model to renting. Thus, high cost of infrastructure cannot limit the less privileged from experiencing the benefits that this new paradigm brings. Therefore, c loud computing provides flexible services to cloud user in the form o f software, platform and infrastructure as services. The goal behind cloud computing is to provide computing resources on-demand to cloud users efficiently, through making data centers as friendly to the environment as possible, by reducing data center energy consumption and carbon emissions. With the massive growth of high performance computational services and applications, huge investment is required to build large scale data centers with thousands o f centers and computing model. Large scale data centers consume enormous amount s of electrical energy. The computational intensity involved in data center is likely to dramatically increase the difference between the amount of energy required for peak periods and of T-peak periods in a cloud computing data center. In addition to the overwhelming operational cost, the overheating caused by high power consumption will affect the reliability o f machines and hence reduce their lifetime. There fore, in order to make the best u e of precious electricity resources, it is important to know how much energy will be required under a certain circumstance in a data center. Consequently, this dissertation addresses the challenge by developing and energy-efficient model and a defragmentation algorithm. We further develop an efficient energy usage metric to calculate the power consumption along with a Load Balancing Virtual Machine Aware Model for improving delivery of no-demand resource in a cloud-computing environment. The load balancing model supports the reduction of energy consumption and helps to improve quality of service. An experimental design was carried out using cloud analyst as a simulation tool. The results obtained show that the LBVMA model and throttled load balancing algorithm consumed less energy. Also, the quality or service in terms of response time is much better for data centers that have more physical machines. but memory configurations at higher frequencies consume more energy. Additionally, while using the LBVMA model in conjunction with the throttled load balancing algorithm, less energy is consumed. meaning less carbon is produced by the data center. / Thesis (M.Sc.(Computer Science) North-West University, Mafikeng Campus, 2013

Cloud computing technology has been emerging and spreading at a great pace due to its service oriented architecture, elasticity, cost-effectiveness, etc. Many organizations are using Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) public Clouds for data migration away from traditional IT Infrastructure but there are a few fields such as finance, hospitals, military and others that are reluctant to use public Clouds due to perceived security vulnerability. Enterprises in such fields feel more vulnerable to security breaches and feel secure using in-house IT infrastructure. The introduction of private Clouds is a solution for these businesses. Private Clouds have been substituted for the traditional IT Infrastructure due to its flexible ``pay-as-you-go" model within an organization by departments and enhanced privacy relative to public Clouds in the form of administration control and supervision. Goal of my thesis is to build and evaluate a private Cloud that can provide virtual machines (VMs) as a service and applications as a service. To achieve this goal, in my thesis, I have built and evaluated a service oriented IaaS model of private Cloud. I have used off-the-shelf servers and open-source software for this purpose. I have proposed a new replication strategy using an Openstack component called Cinder. My experiments show that efficient VM failure recovery on the basis of ``preparation delay" time can be achieved using my strategy. I have studied a real-world application of option pricing from the finance market and have used that application for the purpose of testing my private Cloud for compute workload and accuracy of the pricing results. Later, I have compared performance between Cloud VMs and standalone servers. The performance of Cloud VM is found to be better to standalone servers as long as the number of virtual CPUs (vCPUs) are limited to single node. Stratus clouds are groups of small clouds that collectively give a spectacular sight in the sky. The private Cloud I have built uses multiple small modules to achieve the stated goal and hence I named my private Cloud ``Stratus". This Stratus private Cloud is now ready for deploying applications, and for providing VMs on-demand. / October 2016