ITC595 Research Project: Cloud Computing, Issues and Technologies

This research project, conducted as part of ITC595 at Charles Sturt University, provides an in-depth analysis of cloud computing. The project begins with an abstract defining cloud computing as a virtual parallel computing environment based on grid computing, highlighting its role in delivering comp...Read More

ITC595 Research Project (Title)
A. Author
ITC595 MIT, School of Computing & Mathematics, Charles Sturt University
[e-mail]
ABSTRACT – Cloud computing mainly refers to the development
of a parallel computing environment which is virtual in nature along
with this cloud computing can also be considered as a new
computational model this is mainly based upon the grid computing.
Often the outlining of the Cloud computing is done as a computing
surroundings. This mainly whenever computing id demanded by
one party. Cloud computing has been associated with providing the
latest effort while delivering the computing resource as a service.
Representation of this is often shown as a shift away from the
computing as a product. This is being delivered to the customers by
means of the internet from the large-scale data centres or from the
clouds. The cloud computing is gaining a lot of popularity in
different type of data centers.
Keywords— Cloud computing, architecture, challenges, cloud
platforms, research issues.
INTRODUCTION
Cloud computing can be considered as a very new technology.
This includes the development of the parallel computing,
distributed computing, grid computing and all the combination
and evaluation of the different things, which includes the
virtualization, utility computing, software-as-a- service (SaaS),
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service
(PaaS). The use of the term cloud is done as a Metaphor and
this is done for the purpose of defining the web as a space
which mainly consists of the pre-installed computing
environment and is associated with providing various type of
services. For the users the cloud computing is considered as a
“Pay-per-use-on-demand” mode which can be accessed
conveniently and the IT resources can be shared in an easy
way by making use of the internet. The resources of the IT
mainly includes the network, server, storage, application,
service and many more (Ali, Khan & Vasilakos, 2015). For all
this reason it is easy to deploy the cloud computing in a very
easy and quick way assisted by least management. This also
includes the interactions with the service providers as well.
Cloud computing has been associated with the increase of the
availability of various resources and there also exists several
additional benefits when compared to normal computing.
Users are capable of using the IT infrastructure with Pay-per-
Use-On-Demand mode which would be initially helping them
in earning a lot of benefits along with helping them in saving
the cost which is required to buy the physical resources.
A. Overview of the technology
The utilization of cloud computing is mainly involved with the
use of cloud features. In case of cloud computing features, the
resources are hosted in a remote place and remote processing
usually does its accessing. The resources are usually stored in
third party places that are responsible for storing them. There
are various vendors in place who are associated with providing
such amount of cloud solutions for companies or enterprises
to operate (Almorsy, Grundy & Müller, 2016).There are three
features of cloud computing. The first is the transmission of
data to the cloud structure. The second feature is the
transmission of data from the vendor side to the client side.
The last feature of this process is the storage of the data in the
cloud provided to the client.
B. Relevant technologies and its application
The cloud computing technology involves the hosting of
resources in cloud spaces which can then be utilized for
remote operations. The relevant technologies of the cloud
solutions are the IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. IaaS is termed as
infrastructure as a service, which is mainly involved in
providing infrastructure based solutions that can be easily
provided over internet. Similarly, the PaaS is termed as
platform as a service which is concerned with the provisioning
of software or hardware tools to the client for making their
own application (Botta et al., 2016).Lastly, the SaaS is the
software as a service is involved with providing access to cloud
applications that can be used for various application specific
operations.
In case of IaaS, the relevant application is the virtualization
processes. In this case, the hosted applications are the servers
or data centers which can be provided to the clients for
addressing in their business activities. The application of PaaS
technology includes the acquisition of cloud solutions for their
needs. Virtualized technology is also another application of
this technology (Beloglazov, Abawajy & Buyya, 2012). Lastly,
the software suites are the main applications of the SaaS
technology of cloud computing. In this case, the software
suites are provided to the client for addressing them in their
business activities.
Software as a Service (SaaS): The consumers of the
Cloud have realized the need of hosting their application
which can be accessed by making use of the networks from
various clients which might include the Web browser, PDA,
and many more, by different users of the application. There
exists no control by the Cloud consumers over the
infrastructure of the cloud and often this is responsible for
adopting a multi-tenancy system architecture, which includes
the different cloud consumers' applications. This are later
organized in a single logical environment in the SaaS cloud for
the purpose of achieving the economies related to the scale
and also the optimization of the speed, security, availability,
disaster recovery and maintenance (Rittinghouse & Ransome,
2016). Examples of SaaS include SalesForce.com, Google Mail,
Google Docs, and so forth.
Platform As A Service (PaaS): PaaS can be considered as a
development platform which is associated with supporting the
full “Software Lifecycle” which is initially responsible for
allowing the consumers of the cloud to develop various cloud
services and applications (e.g. SaaS) directly upon the PaaS
cloud. So it can be stated there exists a major difference
between the SaaS and PaaS which means that the SaaS is only
associated with hosting the completed cloud applications
whereas PaaS is associated with offering a platform for the

development which is responsible for hosting both completed
as well as the in-progress cloud applications (Wei et al., 2014).
PaaS is required, along with the supporting application present
in the hosting environment. This is done for the purpose of
posing the development infrastructure. The infrastructure
mainly includes the programming environment, tools,
configuration management, and many more. An example of
PaaS is Google AppEngine.
Infrastructure as A Service (IaaS): Cloud consumers are
associated with use of different IT infrastructures which
includes the “processing, storage, networks and other
fundamental computing resources”. This are generally
provided by the IaaS cloud. The use of the Virtualization at an
extensive rate in the IaaS cloud is done and this is done for the
purpose of integrating or decomposing the various physical
resources in an ad-hoc manner. This is done for the purpose of
meeting the growing or shrinking of the resource demanded
by the cloud users. Virtualization’s basic strategy mainly
includes the setting up of an independent virtual machines
(VM). This VM’s are isolated from the underlying hardware as
well as from the other VMs (Zissis & Lekkas, 2012). It is also to
be notice that this strategy can be defines as a totally different
thing as compared to the multi tenancy model. This is mainly
aimed at transforming the application software architecture.
This is done in order to make sure that the received multiple
instances from various cloud consumers are capable of
running as a similar logic machine. An example of IaaS is
Amazon's EC2
Data as A Service (DAAS): Delivering of the on demand
virtualized storage has led to a formation of a totally separate
Cloud service - data storage service. Along with this it is also to
be noticed that considering the DaaS a special form of the IaaS
is also possible. The motivation of this includes a database
system based on premise enterprise and this are often tied in
a prohibitive upfront cost present in the server. Besides this it
os a totally dedicated, software license, post-delivery services
and inhouse IT maintenance. DaaS is associated with allowing
the clients to pay for the services that are being used by them
actually instead of paying for the site license of the entire
database. Along with the storage interfaces which are
traditional like the RDBMS and file systems, there also exists
some offerings of the DaaS which are associated with
providing a table-style abstractions (Li et al., 2013). This are
mainly designed for scaling the storage and for the retrieval of
the data which are huge in amount along with presenting
them in different time frames which might be very
compressed, or too large, or too expensive or too slow for
most commercial RDBMS to cope with. Examples of this kind
of DaaS include Amazon S3, Google BigTable, and Apache
HBase, etc.
LITEERATURE REVIEW
C. ISSUES IN CLOUD COMPUTING:
Cloud computing is associated with providing of infinite
number of computing resources which are provided according
to the demand and this mainly happens due to the high
scalable nature of the cloud computing. This is initially
responsible for the elimination of the various needs for Cloud
service providers which is mainly done for the purpose of
planning for the provisioning methods over the hardware.
There exists many companies, like the Amazon, Google,
Microsoft and many more are associated with accelerating
their paces in the process of development of the various cloud
computing systems this is initially responsible for enhancing
the various services which are provided to a larger amount of
users. This paper is mainly associated with investigate the
various security and privacy concerns present in the cloud
computing systems and this are mainly provided by numerous
amount of companies (Rittinghouse & Ransome, 2016).
According to the definition of the cloud computing which
states that this is an applications which is associated with
delivering different type of services over the Internet as well
as the infrastructures which might include the hardware and
systems software in the data centres. Initially this are
associated with providing this type of this services. By
depending on the investigation about the various concerns
regarding the security and privacy has been provided by
different companies is not adequate, and initially this has
resulted in the creation of obstacle which are faced by the
users while they try to adapt the cloud computing systems. So
it is necessary that more concerns on security issues, such as
availability, confidentiality, data integrity, control, and audit
and many more and it is compulsory to take all this into
account.
The main challenge of the cloud computing technology is
the need to know the location of the data resource. As the
cloud solution vendors usually know data storage that is done
in the cloud, the client is not aware of the actual location of
the data. This is the main security challenge because in case
there is a breach in system, the whole resource will be lost.
The next challenge is the disaster mitigation problems
(Chaisiri, Lee & Niyato, 2012). In case of a disaster
occurrence, the need to back up the system is required. As the
cloud resources are carried by the LAN technologies, the
speed of backing up is slow. For this reason, the business
aspects take much time to get online.
The different issues in the cloud computing has been listed
below:
1. Privacy: Cloud computing is associated with the
utilization of various virtual computing technology along with
this the various personal data of the user can also be stored in
a in several virtual data centres rather than keeping them in a
single physical location, besides this the hidden information
also might get leaked while the users are accessing the various
cloud computing services (Hashizume et al., 2013). Beside this
the attackers are also capable of analysing the critical task
which are generally dependent on the tasks related to
computing and are generally submitted by the users.
2. Reliability: There exists several situations when the server
of the cloud might experience a downtime and this would be
responsible for slowing down the local server.
3. Legal Issues: Different types of risks are associated with
the measures related to the safety and the confidentiality of
an individual throughout the entire legislative levels.
4. Compliance: There exists several rules which are
responsible for pertaining the storage and the data is generally
associated with requiring regular reporting along with trails for
the audit (Chaisiri, Lee & Niyato, 2012). Besides this, the
requirements of the customers along with the data centres are
maintained by the cloud providers only.
5. Freedom: Cloud computing is not associated with
allowing the users to have a physical access to the storage of
the data which is initially responsible for leaving the storage of
the data storage along with the controls of the storage in the
hands of cloud providers.

6. Long- Term Viability: it is to be made sure that the data
which are being uploaded to the clouds will never become
invalid even after the closure of the cloud computing provider
or have been acquired and swallowed up by a larger company.
7. Issues in Cloud Interoperability:
7.1) Intermediary Layer: numerous work have been
associated with addressing the issues related to
interoperability and this is done by means of providing an
intermediary layer which would be existing between the
consumers of the cloud and the resources which are cloud-
specific for example the VM.
7.2) Open Standard: Standardization is considered to a
very much beneficial solution for the purpose of addressing
the several issues related to interoperability. But due to the
reason that the cloud computing technology has just
started to take off, the interoperability problem has not
appeared on the pressing agenda of major industry cloud
vendors (Xiao, Song & Chen, 2013).
7.3) Open API: SUN has recently been associated with the
launching of the Sun Open Cloud Platform under the
Creative Commons license. One of the major contribution of
this platform includes the proposed (in-progress) cloud API.
It is also associated with defining a set of clear and easy-to-
understand Restful Web services interfaces, by this the
consumers of the cloud are capable of creating and
managing the various resources of the cloud, and this also
includes the compute, storage, and networking components
in a unified way.
7.4) SaaS and PaaS Interoperability: Besides the solutions
which has been provided before are generally associated
with tackling the interoperability problems of the IaaS,
interoperability of the SaaS and are often associated with
involving the different application domains which mainly
includes the ERP, CRM, and many more (Garg, Versteeg &
Buyya, 2013). Specialized Group of experts in the field of
data mining have raised the issue of creating data mining
standards on the cloud, along with this their focus is mainly
aimed at “the practical use of statistical algorithms, reliable
production deployment of models and the integration of
predictive analytics” across different data mining-based
SaaS clouds. Discovery of the PaaS interoperability not yet
been done and this has happened because the PaaS mainly
involves the entire software development life-cycle on the
cloud. Besides this it would be very much difficult to reach
the uniformity while considering the ways by which the
consumers develop and deploy cloud applications.
D. Identification of gaps
The gaps that were present in the traditional business
model have been addressed due to the introduction of cloud
technology. For this reason, the cloud computing technology
involved the provision of cloud solutions to their clients
mainly in the form of hosted solutions (Hashem et al.,
2015). As a result, the introduction of cloud software or
cloud infrastructure is now able to solve their problem of
data hosting and storage.
The main gaps present in the cloud computing
technology are the security aspects. The cloud is always
subjected to various problems which have to be addressed.
The security and privacy is the main requirement of the
cloud solutions and the vendors need to utilize various
safety measures to enhance their security. The most
common cloud attacks are the DDoS attacks. These are
involved in flooding a massive amount of traffic to the
system that crashes the server. The attacker then utilizes
this opportunity to get access to the system (Wang et al.,
2012). This type of security problems are to be solved by
the vendors of cloud solutions.
This is a critical issue in the adoption of cloud
computing in the market. If the resources from a cloud are
lost, the most affected stakeholder is the client. This will
lead them to loss of business revenue streams. As a result,
the company can also lose their brand value in the market.
For this reason, this security aspects needs to be referenced
properly.
E. RELEVANT TECHNOLOGIES AND ITS APPLICATION
The cloud computing technology involves the hosting
of resources in cloud spaces which can then be utilized for
remote operations. The relevant technologies of the cloud
solutions are the IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. IaaS is termed as
infrastructure as a service, which is mainly involved in
providing infrastructure based solutions that can be easily
provided over internet. Similarly, the PaaS is termed as
platform as a service, which is concerned with the
provisioning of software or hardware, tools to the client for
making their own application (Fernando, Loke & Rahayu,
2013). Lastly, the SaaS is the software as a service is
involved with providing access to cloud applications that
can be used for various application specific operations.
1. In case of IaaS, the relevant application is the
virtualization processes. In this case, the hosted applications
are the servers or data centers which can be provided to
the clients for addressing in their business activities. The
application of PaaS technology includes the acquisition of
cloud solutions for their needs. Virtualized technology is
also another application of this technology. Lastly, the
software suites are the main applications of the SaaS
technology of cloud computing (Dinh et al., 2013). In this
case, the software suites are provided to the client for
addressing them in their business activities.
F. Characteristics of the Cloud computing
Cloud computing consists of a feature which helps the users
in accessing the various information, applications or the other
services by taking assistance from the browser by
notwithstanding the device which are being used and also the
location of the user. The infrastructure which is mostly
provided by a third-party can be accessed by taking assistance
from the web. Price has also been reduced to a major level
and this has happened because of the reason that the
infrastructure is provided by a third-party. IT skills required
for handling and implementation of this technology is also
less. Besides this the Reliable services are often obtained by
employing a multiple sites which are appropriate for the
continuity of the business and recovering from any type of
disaster. The maintenance of the cloud is also very much
simple because there is no need of put this in every user's PC
(Jadeja & Modi, 2012). Pay per use facility helps in permitting
the usage of application per shopper on regular bases.
Performance is often monitored and so it's ascendible.
Security is also pretty much as good as or higher than ancient
systems and due to this reason the suppliers are being capable
of devoting their resources to resolution security problems
which cannot be afforded by several customers. However,

security still remains a crucial concern once the information is
sort of confidential.
PROPOSED DESIGN
The utilization of the cloud computing is a successful
business model if the issues pertaining to the security and the
privacy can be addressed. For this reason, the vendors of the
cloud solution need to adopt the utilization of the security
mechanisms like authentication or encryption in their system.
Cloud computing systems can achieve the following five
goals together:
Cloud computing systems can achieve the following five
goals together:
1. Data integrity: Cloud system generally means preserving
the information integrity which means not lose or get
modified by any unauthorized users. Because of the reason
that the data are the base for providing cloud computing
services, which might include the Data as a Service, Software
as a Service, Platform as a Service, keeping data integrity is
one of the major fundamental task.
2. Confidentiality: This means the data of the user should be
kept as a secret in the cloud systems. This can be done by
adopting two basic approaches which includes the physical
isolation and cryptography, in order to achieve confidentiality,
which is to be extensively adopted by the cloud computing
vendors (Xu, 2012).
3. Audit: This means keeping a watch on whatever is
happening in the cloud system. Auditability might be included
as an additional layer in the various virtualized operation
system which are generally hosted on the virtual machine in
order to provide facilities like watching what is happening in
the system or what has already happed in the system. This is
much more secure than that is built into the applications or
into the software themselves, because this is capable of watch
the entire duration of access (Dinh et al., 2013).
4. Availability: The main goal of availability for cloud
computing systems mainly includes the providing of ensure
that the user would be capable of using the clouds anytime
from anywhere. Due to the fact that this is having a web-
native nature, cloud computing system has been associated
with enabling its users to access the system.
5. Control: this generally refers to the regulation of using
the system, which might include the applications, its
infrastructure and the data (Arora, Parashar & Transforming,
2013).
CONCLUSION
This paper has been associate with discussing about the
architecture and various platforms of cloud computing
technology which are very much popular. The paper has also
been associated with discussing the various challenges and
issues that are faced by the cloud technology. Despite of the
existence of different limitations and advantages there also
exists the need for better methodologies processes. Besides all
this the cloud computing is an emerging technology and is also
considered as a highly attractive paradigm, mainly for the large
enterprises. Cloud computing is also considered as a new
paradigm of computing utilities which has been associated in
promising to provide more flexibility, less expense, and more
efficiency in IT services to end users.
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