Markets are increasingly dynamic. Products and skills rapidly become obsolete, eroding competitiveness. So incumbents need to find and implement new ideas at an ever faster pace. Also, new businesses are entering the market more rapidly, and they are extending their portfolios by forging alliances with other players.

Standardized production also enables ICT providers to achieve greater economies of scale. However, this calls for highly effective ICT management— on the part of both the service provider and the customer. Proven concepts and methodologies from the manufacturing industry can be applied to ICT. The following are particularly worth mentioning:

• Standardization
• Automation
• Modularization
• Integrated creation of ICT services

If consumers’ Internet or ICT services are unavailable, or data access is slow, the consequences are rarely serious. But in business, the nonavailability of a service can have a grave knock-on effect on entire mission-critical processes—bringing production to a standstill, or preventing orders from being processed.

Map Reduce is a software framework for solving many large-scale computing problems. The Map Reduce abstraction is inspired by the Map and Reduce functions, which are commonly used in functional languages such as Lisp

Data-Aware. When the Map Reduce-Master node is scheduling the Map tasks for a newly submitted job, it takes in consideration the data location information retrieved from the GFS- Master node.

Simplicity. As the Map Reduce runtime is responsible for parallelization and concurrency control, this allows programmers to easily design parallel and distributed applications.

Hadoop is a top-level Apache project, being built and used by a community of contributors from all over the world. It was advocated by industry’s premier Web players—Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Facebook—as the engine to power the cloud

The Map/Reduce framework has master/slave architecture. The master, called JobTracker, is responsible for (a) querying the NameNode for the block locations, (b) scheduling the tasks on the slave which is hosting the task’s blocks, and (c) monitoring the successes and failures of the tasks. The slaves, called TaskTracker, execute the tasks as directed by the master.

Disco is an open-source MapReduce implementation developed by Nokia. The Disco core is written in Erlang, while users of Disco typically write jobs in Python. Disco was started at Nokia Research Center as a lightweight framework for rapid scripting of distributed data processing tasks.

MapReduce.NET is designed for the Windows platform, with emphasis on reusing as many existing Windows components as possible. The MapReduce.Net runtime library is assisted by several components services from Aneka and runs on WinDFS.

Skynet is a Ruby implementation of MapReduce, created by Geni. Skynet is“anadaptive, self- upgrading, fault-tolerant,andfully distributed system with no single point of failure” .

At the heart of Skynet is plug-in based message queue architecture, with the message queuing allowing workers to watch out for each other.

Grid Gain is an open cloud platform, developed in Java, for Java. Grid Gain enables users to develop and run applications on private or public clouds.

The MapReduce paradigm is at core of what Grid Gain does. It defines the process of splitting an initial task into multiple subtasks, executing these subtasks in parallel and aggregating (reducing) results back to one final result.

SAP systems are used for a variety of business applications that differ by version and functionality [such as customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning. Certain SAP applications are

composed of several loosely coupled systems. Such systems have independent databases and communicate asynchronously by message with each other.

• Requests are handled by the SAP Web
• In the middle tier, there are two types of components: multiple stateful dialog instances (DIs) and a single central instance (CI) that performs central services such as application- level locking, messaging, and registration of DIs. The number of DIs can be changed while the system is running to adapt to load
• A single database management system (DBMS) serves the SAP

• Managing thousands of different service components that comprise a variety of service applications executed by thousands of virtual execution environments, on top of a complex infrastructure that also includes network and storage systems.
• Consolidating many applications on the same infrastructure, thereby increasing HW utilization and optimizing power consumption, while keeping the operational cost at
• Guaranteeing the individual SLAs of the many customers of the data center who face different and fluctuating

The cloud should dynamically adjust resource allocation parameters (memory, CPU, network bandwidth, storage) of individual virtual execution environments seamlessly. Moreover, the number of virtual execution environments must be dynamically and seamlessly adjusted to adapt to the changing load.

One of the main advantages of cloud computing is the capability to provide, or release, resources on-demand. These “elasticity” capabilities should be enacted automatically by cloud computing providers to meet demand variations, just as electrical companies are able (under normal operational circumstances) to automatically deal with variances in electricity consumption levels.

The baseline federation is the most basic federation scenario, but even here the SM must be allowed to specify placement restrictions when a service is deployed.

virtualized service-oriented infrastructures provide computing as a commodity for today’s competitive businesses. Besides costeffectiveness, they also ensure optimized use of system and network resources, reduced carbon footprints, and simplify management of their underlying resources.

The Internet represents the same origin of threats for the communication across the RESERVOIR sites (VMI interfaces) and outside the RESERVOIR sites both for the SMI interface and service interface

Each RESERVOIR site has a logical representation with three different layers, but these layers can be compounded by one or more hardware components.

Admission control algorithms play an important role in deciding the set of requests that should be admitted into the application server when the server experiences “very” heavy load.

In the application co-location hosting model, the server capacity is available to the applications based solely on their resource demands. Hence, the service providers are flexible in allocating and de-allocating computing resources among the co-located applications.

SLA life cycle and consists of the following five phases:

• Contract definition
• Publishing and discovery
• Negotiation
• Operationalization
• De-commissioning

Once the customer has discovered a service provider who can meet their application hosting need, the SLA terms and conditions needs to be mutually agreed upon before signing the agreement for hosting the application.

SLA management of applications hosted on cloud platforms involves five phases.

• Feasibility
• On-boarding
• Pre-production
• Production
• Termination

The operation policy defines a sequence of actions to be enacted under different conditions/trigger points. The rules engine evaluates the data captured by the monitoring system, evaluates against the predefined operation rules, and triggers the associated action if required.

Virtual Engine (VE). These are related to the performance loss introduced by the virtualization mechanism. They are strictly related to the VE technology adopted.

Cloud Environment (CE). These are the losses introduced at a higher level by the cloud environment, and they are mainly due to overheads and to the sharing of computing and communication resources.

“Grid vs Cloud” is the title of an incredible number of recent Web blogs and articles in on-line forums and magazines, where many HPC users express their own opinion on the relationship between the two paradigms [Cloud is simply presented, by its supporters, as an evolution of the grid. Some consider grids and clouds as alternative options to do the same thing in a different way. However, there are very few clouds on which one can build, test, or run compute-intensive applications.

They are the four types of Cloud Computing.

1. Public Private
2. Private
3. Community             
4. Hybrid

They are the seven types of advantage of Cloud Computing

1. Cost reduction
2. Scalability
3. Levels the playing field
4. Easier Collaboration
5. Affordable
6. Scalable and Flexible
7. Efficiency

They are the six types of Disadvantage of Cloud Computing

1. Security concerns
2. Risk of losing internet connection
3. Limited resources for customization
4. Availability
5. Data mobility and ownership
6. Privacy

They are the three area of process.

1. Plan
2. Execute       
3. Monitor

They are the six types of Cloud Computing

1. WWW-based Cloud Computing
2. Software as a Service
3. Platform as a Service
4. Utility Cloud Computing Services
5. Managed Services
6. Service Commerce

A public cloud is based on the standard Cloud computing model, where the service provider makes the resources such as storage and application available to the public over the WWW. These service may be free or on a pay-per-usage model.

A private cloud is a proprietary computing model that provides services to user who are behind a firewall.

They are the five types are models in cloud service

1. SaaS
2. PaaS
3. Iaas
4. Baas
5. Maas

They are the three types of other Cloud-related techniques

1. Grid computing
2. Utility computing
3. Automatic computing

The following steps are:

1. Choose on-demand technology which will be the foundation for your infrastructure.
2. Determine how your employees can access information from the infrastructure.
3. Prepare the infrastructure with the necessary software and hardware.
4. Set up each computer to access the infrastructure.
5. Integrate all aspects of the infrastructure so that all employees can participate in resource.

It is service, where application/software can be build, tested and deployed at a single unit.

Paas is a useful for application builders, developers, deployers and testers.

Provider of SaaS has full administrative rights for its application and responsible for activities such as deployment, maintenance and update.

1. Centralized Data Storage in Cloud
2. Cloud Servers Maintenance and
3. Data Access and Network
4. Cost Factor
5. Cloud Servers Data Backup and Availability

1. IaaS
2. PaaS                         
3. SaaS             
4. BaaS

1. Public
2. Private        
3. 3. Hybrid.

The CDM provides an open frame work for identifying the necessities and differences of various cloud deployment environment.

1. Cost
2. Complexity 
3. Speed       
4. Cloud Portability     
5. Security

Combining internal and external providers termed as combined cloud. By intergrating multiplecloud services, consumers can ease the transition to public cloud services.

1. Abstraction
2. Automation             
3. Elasticity

Cloud federation is interconnectiong the cloud computing environments with two or more service providers for balancing the traffic load and to surge spikes while there is demand.

Virtualization reduces the burden of workloads of users by centralizing the administrative tasks and improving the scalability and workloads.

Virtual machines consolidate the workloads of under-utilized servers. Because of this onc can save on hardware, environmental costs and management.

They are the six types of Virtualization

1. Sever Virtualization
2. Network Virtualization
3. Storage Virtualization
4. Desktop Virtualization
5. Application Virtualization
6. Management Virtualization

1. Consolidation
2. Redundancy             
3. Legacy System         
4. Migration

They are the four types of advantages

1. Flexible provisioning
2. Rapid software deployment
3. Easy and efficient implaning updates
4. Easy rollback scenarios

They are the four types of disadvantages

1. No work off-line capability
2. High-speed LAN
3. Limited number of OS are supported
4. Imaging disadvantages apply to this

Cluster is defined as a type of parallel or distributed system that consists of a collection of interconnected computers and is used as a single, unified computing resource. Forming a cluster refers to a collection of computers boubnded together to form a common resource pool.

They are the two primary types of storage Virtualization

1. Block Virtualization
2. File Virtualization

They are the five components

1. Network switch adapters
2. Netowork elements
3. VLAN and VMs
4. Network mobile elements
5. Network

CloudStack includes a computer function that assigns virtual machines (VMs) to individual servers, a network function that manages switches to create and manage logical networks, object and block storage systems, an image management function and an administration interface. Cloud computing that supports all components of the software stack.

Server virtualization is a virtualization technique that involves partitioning a physical server into a number of small, virtual servers with the help of virtualization software. In server virtualization, each virtual server runs multiple operating system instances at the same time.

In computing, network virtualization or network virtualisation is the process of combining hardware and software network resources and network functionality into a single, software-based administrative entity, a virtual network.

A cloud engineering discipline has its own lifecycle model like other engineering disciplines, for a systematic and scientific development of the cloud known as cloud development lifecycle model.

They are the six phases of CDLC.

1. Reuirement and Analysis
2. Architect
3. Implementation and Integration
4. Quality Assurance and Verification
5. Deploy, Testing and
6. Monitor, Migrate and

Cloud Computing can be defined as delivering computing power( CPU, RAM, Network Speeds, Storage OS software) a service over a network (usually on the internet) rather than physically having the computing resources at the customer location.

Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user. The term is generally used to describe data centers available to many users over the Internet.

Example: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud

• Email
• Storage, backup, and data retrieval
• Creating and testing apps
• Analyzing data
• Audio and video streaming
• Delivering software on demand

The cloud infrastructure is provisioned for open use by the general public. It may be owned, managed, and operated by a business, academic, or government organization, or some combination of them. It exists on the premises of the cloud provider.

The cloud infrastructure is provisioned for exclusive use by a specific community of consumers from organizations that have shared concerns (e.g., mission, security requirements, policy, and compliance considerations). It may be owned, managed, and operated by one or more of the organizations in the community, a third party, or some combination of them, and it may exist on or off premises.

The cloud infrastructure is a composition of two or more distinct cloud infrastructures (private, community, or public) that remain unique entities, but are bound together by standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability (e.g., cloud bursting for load balancing between clouds).

SaaS or software as a service is a software distribution model in which applications are hosted by a vendor or service provider and made available to customers over a network (internet). SaaS is becoming an increasingly prevalent delivery model as underlying technologies   that supports Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) or Web Services. Through internet this service is available to users anywhere in the world.

IaaS (Infrastructure As A Service) is one of the fundamental service model of cloud computing alongside PaaS( Platform as a Service). It provides access to computing resources in a virtualized environment “the cloud” on internet. It provides computing infrastructure like virtual server space, network connections, bandwidth, load balancers and IP addresses. The pool of hardware resource is extracted from multiple servers and networks usually distributed across numerous data centers. This provides redundancy and reliability to IaaS.

Platform as a service, is referred as PaaS, it provides a platform and environment to allow developers to build applications and services. This service is hosted in the cloud and accessed by the users via internet.

Cloud migration is the process of moving digital business operations into the cloud. Cloud migration is sort of like a physical move, except it involves moving data, applications, and IT processes from some data centers to other data centers, instead of packing up and moving physical goods. Much like a move from a smaller office to a larger one, cloud migration requires quite a lot of preparation and advance work, but usually it ends up being worth the effort, resulting in cost savings and greater flexibility.

The general goal or benefit of any cloud migration is to host applications and data in the most effective IT environment possible, based on factors such as cost, performance and security.

For example, many organizations perform the migration of on-premises applications and data from their local data center to public cloud infrastructure to take advantage of benefits, such as greater elasticity, self-service provisioning, redundancy and a flexible, pay-per-use model.

• Controlling
• Visibility & flexibility
• Security and privacy
• High performance and Availability
• Integration and composition
• Standards

Virtualization is the key component of cloud computing for providing computing and storage services. Virtualization is the ability to run multiple operating systems on a single physical system and share the underlying hardware resources. It is the process by which one computer hosts the appearance of many computers.

Google app engine is a SaaS provider which was introduced in 2008. It was quite unique cloud system compared to other systems. It provides platform to create applications. It provides infrastructure for hosting. Many high level services which need to be build are available when using an App Engine.

Business-to-business exchanges have become a common form of procurement due to their advantages regarding flexibility (such as the ability of being able to quickly change business partners), although the mean procurement prices are generally higher compared to long-term contracts. On the other side, a lot of procurement managers still believe that long-term relationships are the key in the procurement process partly due to cost savings. Two main conflicting opinions on the optimal type of relationship – as it seems.

The very concept of cloud represents a leap from traditional approach for IT to deliver mission critical services. With any leap comes the gap of risk and challenges to overcome. These challenges can be classified in five different categories, which are the five aspects of the enterprise cloud stages: build, develop, migrate, run, and consume

A virtual local area network (VLAN) is a logical group of workstations, servers and network devices that appear to be on the same LAN despite their geographical distribution. A VLAN allows a network of computers and users to communicate in a simulated environment as if they exist in a single LAN and are sharing a single broadcast and multicast domain. VLANs are implemented to achieve scalability, security and ease of network management and can quickly adapt to changes in network requirements and relocation of workstations and server nodes.

Virtualization in Cloud Computing is making a virtual platform of server operating system and storage devices. This will help the user by providing multiple machines at the same time it also allows sharing a single physical instance of resource or an application to multiple users. Cloud Virtualizations also manage the workload by transforming traditional computing and make it more scalable, economical and efficient.

1. Types of Virtualization in Cloud Computing
   • Operating System Virtualization
   • Hardware Virtualization
   • Server Virtualization
   • Storage Virtualization

A Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) is a software program that enables the creation, management and governance of virtual machines (VM) and manages the operation of a virtualized environment on top of a physical host machine.

The hypervisor isolates the operating systems from the primary host machine. The job of hypervisor is to cater to the needs of a guest operating system and to manage it efficiently Xen is a hypervisor that enables the simultaneous creation, execution and management of multiple virtual machines on one physical computer.

Cloud computing is changing the way how hardware and software are provided for on-demand capacity fulfillment. Lately there are ways for on-demand servers, storage and CDNs. These are changing the way in developing web applications and make business decisions.

Virtualization management is software that interfaces with virtual environments and the underlying physical hardware to simplify resource administration, enhance data analyses, and streamline operations. Each virtualization management system is unique, but most feature an uncomplicated user interface, streamline the virtual machine (VM) creation process, monitor virtual environments, allocate resources, compile reports, and automatically enforce rules.

A new trend in the computer software industry that seems to be sticking around for good is the idea of cloud software, also occasionally known as open-source software. This model of software allows you and your team to run computer applications over the internet from anywhere so long as you have a subscription, rather than having one copy to install locally on a piece of hardware. Fidelity Capital is pleased to provide leasing services for cloud software for clients in a wide variety of industries. We are also capable of working with you to finance the training, installation and programming processes necessary to set up and master your new software.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides scalable computing capacity in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. Using Amazon EC2 eliminates your need to invest in hardware up front, so you can develop and deploy applications faster. You can use Amazon EC2 to launch as many or as few virtual servers as you need, configure security and networking, and manage storage. Amazon EC2 enables you to scale up or down to handle changes in requirements or spikes in popularity, reducing your need to forecast traffic.

Google App Engine (GAE) is a service for developing and hosting Web applications in Google's data centers, belonging to the platform as a service (PaaS) category of cloud computing. Web applications hosted on GAE are sandboxed and run across multiple servers for redundancy and allowing for scaling of resources according to the traffic requirements of the moment. App Engine automatically allocates additional resources to the servers to accommodate increased load.

Microsoft Azure is a platform as a service (PaaS) solution for building and hosting solutions using Microsoft’s products and in their data centers. It is a comprehensive suite of cloud products that allow users to create enterprise-class applications without having to build out their own infrastructure.

Clients need to exchange numerous messages with required Web services to learn the current activity of resources and thus face significant overhead loss if most of the Web services prove ineffective. The novelty of

RVWS is that it combines dynamic attributes, stateful Web services (aware

of their past activity), stateful and dynamic WSDL documents, and brokering into a single, effective, service-based framework. Regardless of clients accessing services directly or discovering them via a broker, clients of RVWS-based distributed systems spend less time learning of services.

the service-based Cluster as a Service (CaaS) Technology the exposure of a cluster via a Web service is intricate and comprises several services running on top of a physical cluster.

Clients should be able to view the execution progress of their jobs. Even though the cluster is not the owned by

the client, the job is. Thus, it is the right of the client to see how the job is progressing and (if the client decides) terminate the job and remove it from the cluster.

A local-area network (LAN) is a computer network that spans a relatively small area. Most often, a LAN is confined to a single room, building or group of buildings, however, one LAN can be connected to other LANs over any distance via telephone lines and radio waves.

A system of LANs connected in this way is called a wide-area network (WAN). The difference between a LAN and WAN is that the wide-area network spans a relatively large geographical area. Typically, a WAN consists of two or more local-area networks (LANs) and are often connected through public networks.

With the development of high-speed network technologies and large bandwidth connections, more and more multimedia data are being stored and shared in cyber space. The security requirements for video, audio, pictures, or images are different from other applications.

Existing methods enable direct execution of encrypted queries on encrypted datasets and allow users to ask identity queries over data of different encryptions. The ultimate goal of this research direction is to make queries in encrypted databases as efficient as possible while preventing adversaries from learning any useful knowledge about the data.

Protocol based on the provable data procession (PDP) technology, which allows users to obtain a probabilistic proof from the storage service providers. Such a proof will be used as evidence that their data have been stored there.

Authentication is the process of verifying a claim that a subject made to act on behalf of a given principal. Authentication attacks target a Web site’s method of validating the identity of a user, service, or application,

including Brute Force, Insufficient Authentication, and Weak Password Recovery Validation. Authorization is used to verify if an authenticated subject can perform a certain operation. Authentication must precede authorization. For example, only certain users are allowed to access specific content or functionality.

Logical Attacks involve the exploitation of a Web application’s logic flow. Usually, a user’s action is completed in a multi-step process. The procedural workflow of the process is called application logic. A common Logical Attack is Denial of Service (DoS).

Despite assurances by the public cloud leaders about security, few provide satisfactory disclosure or have long enough histories with their cloud offerings to provide warranties about the specific level of security put in place in their system. Security in-house is easier to maintain and to rely on.

Aneka [3] is a software platform and a framework for developing distributed applications on the cloud. It harnesses the computing resources of a heterogeneous network of workstations and servers or data centers on demand. Aneka provides developers with a rich set of APIs for transparently exploiting these resources by expressing the application logic with a variety of programming abstractions.

Aneka identifies two types of private resources: static and dynamic resources. Static resources are constituted by existing physical workstations and servers that may be idle for a certain period of time. Their membership to the Aneka cloud is manually configured by administrators and does not change over time. Dynamic resources are mostly represented by virtual instances that join and leave the Aneka cloud and are controlled by resource pool managers that provision and release them when needed.

Workload monitoring becomes even more important in the case of hybrid clouds where a subset of resources is leased and resources can be dismissed if they are no longer necessary. Workload monitoring is an important feature for any distributed middleware, in the case of hybrid clouds, it is necessary to integrate this feature with scheduling policies that either directly or indirectly govern the management of virtual instances and their leases..

This is a container of virtual resources that mostly come from the same resource provider. A resource pool is in charge of managing the virtual resources it contains and eventually releasing them when they are no longer in use.

CometCloud is based on a decentralized coordination substrate, and it supports highly heterogeneous and dynamic cloud/grid infrastructures, integration of public/private clouds, and cloudbursts.

The goal of autonomic cloudbursts is to seamlessly and securely integrate private enterprise clouds and data centers with public utility clouds on-demand, to provide the abstraction of resizable computing capacity.

Application workloads can vary significantly. This includes the number of application tasks as well the computational requirements of a task. The computational environment must dynamically grow (or shrink) in response to these dynamics while still maintaining strict deadlines.

Autonomic cloudbridging is meant to connect CometCloud and a virtual cloud which consists of public cloud, data center, and grid by the dynamic needs of the application. The clouds in the virtual cloud are heterogeneous and have

different types of resources and cost policies, besides, the performance of each cloud can change over time by the number of current users.

Deadline-Based. When an application needs to be completed as soon as possible, assuming an adequate budget, the maximum required workers are allocated for the job.

Budget-Based. When a budget is enforced on the application, the number of workers allocated must ensure that the budget is not violated.

Workload-Based. When the application workload changes, the number of workers explicitly defined by the application is allocated or released.

Supporting fault-tolerance during runtime is critical to keep the application’s deadline. We support fault-tolerance in two ways which are in the infrastructure layer and in the programming layer.

Nonlinear image registration [12] is the computationally expensive process to determine the mapping T between two images of the same object or similar objects acquired at different time, in different position or with different acquisition parameters or modalities.

VaR Using Workload-Based Policy: autonomic cloudburst is represented by the number of changing workers. When the application workload increases (or decreases), a predefined number of workers are added (or released), based on the application workload.

Image Registration Using Budget-Based Policy: The virtual cloud environment used for the experiments consisted of two research sites one public cloud (i.e.,AmazonWeb Service (AWS) EC2 [10]) and one private data center at Rutgers (i.e.,TW). The two research sites hosted their own image servers and job queues, and workers running on EC2 orTWaccess these image servers to get the image.

Basic CometCloud Operations. In this experiment we evaluated the costs of basic tuple insertion and exact retrieval operations on the Rutgers cloud. Each machine was a peer node in the CometCloud overlay and the machines formed a single CometCloud peer group.

T-Systems is one of Europe’s largest ICT service providers. Cloud computing is an opportunity for T-Systems to leverage its established concept for services delivered from data centers. Cloud computing entails the industrialization of IT production, enabling customers to use services and resources on demand. Business, however, cannot adopt wholesale the principles of cloud computing from the consumer world.

Cloud computing security challenges fall into three broad categories:

Data Protection: Securing your data both at rest and in transit

User Authentication: Limiting access to data and monitoring who accesses the data

Disaster and Data Breach: Contingency Planning

Data Protection

Implementing a cloud computing strategy means placing critical data in the hands of a third party, so ensuring the data remains secure both at rest (data residing on storage media) as well as when in transit is of paramount importance. Data needs to be encrypted at all times, with clearly defined roles when it comes to who will be managing the encryption keys. In most cases, the only way to truly ensure the confidentiality of encrypted data that resides on a cloud provider's storage servers is for the client to own and manage the data encryption keys.

User Authentication

Data resting in the cloud needs to be accessible only by those authorized to do so, making it critical to both restrict and monitor who will be accessing the company's data through the cloud. In order to ensure the integrity of user authentication, companies need to be able to view data access logs and audit trails to verify that only authorized users are accessing the data. These access logs and audit trails additionally need to be secured and maintained for as long as the company needs or legal purposes require. As with all cloud computing security challenges, it's the responsibility of the customer to ensure that the cloud provider has taken all necessary security measures to protect the customer's data and access to that data.

Contingency Planning

With the cloud serving as a single centralized repository for a company's mission-critical data, the risks of having that data compromised due to a data breach or temporarily made unavailable due to a natural disaster are real concerns. Much of the liability for the disruption of data in a cloud ultimately rests with the company whose mission-critical operations depend on that data, although liability can and should be negotiated in a contract with the services provider prior to commitment. A comprehensive security assessment from a neutral third party is strongly recommended as well.

Companies need to know how their data is being secured and what measures the service provider will be taking to ensure the integrity and availability of that data should the unexpected occur. Additionally, companies should also have contingency plans in place in the event their cloud provider fails or goes bankrupt. Can the data be easily retrieved and migrated to a new service provider or to a non-cloud strategy if this happens? And what happens to the data and the ability to access that data if the provider gets acquired by another company?

2011 ended with the popularization of an idea: Bringing VMs (virtual machines) onto the cloud. Recent years have seen great advancements in both cloud computing and virtualization On one hand there is the ability to pool various resources to provide software-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service, and platform-as-a-service. At its most basic, this is what describes cloud computing. On the other hand, we have virtual machines that provide agility, flexibility, and scalability to the cloud resources by allowing the vendors to copy, move, and manipulate their VMs at will. The term virtual machine essentially describes sharing the resources of one single physical computer into various computers within itself. VMware and virtual boxes are very commonly used virtual systems on desktops. Cloud computing effectively stands for many computers pretending to be one computing environment. Obviously, cloud computing would have many virtualized systems to maximize resources.

Keeping this information in mind, we can now look into the security issues that arise within a cloud-computing scenario. As more and more organizations follow the “Into the Cloud” concept, malicious hackers keep finding ways to get their hands on valuable information by manipulating safeguards and breaching the security layers (if any) of cloud environments. One issue is that the cloud-computing scenario is not as transparent as it claims to be. The service user has no clue about how his information is processed and stored. In addition, the service user cannot directly control the flow of data/information storage and processing. The service provider usually is not aware of the details of the service running in his or her environment. Thus, possible attacks on the cloud-computing environment can be classified in to:

Resource attacks:

These kinds of attacks include manipulating the available resources into mounting a large-scale botnet attack. These kinds of attacks target either cloud providers or service providers.

Data attacks:

These kinds of attacks include unauthorized modification of sensitive data at nodes, performing configuration changes to enable a sniffing attack via a specific device etc. These attacks are focused on cloud providers, service providers, and also on service users.

Denial of Service attacks:

The creation of a new virtual machine is not a difficult task, and thus, creating rogue VMs and allocating huge spaces for them can lead to a Denial of Service attack for service providers when they opt to create a new VM on the cloud. This kind of attack is generally called virtual machine sprawling.

Backdoor:

Another threat to a virtual environment empowered by cloud computing is the use of backdoor VMs that leak sensitive information and can destroy data privacy.

Having virtual machines would indirectly allow anyone with access to the host disk files of the VM to take a snapshot or illegal copy of the whole System. This can lead to corporate espionage and piracy of legitimate products.

With so many obvious security issues (and a lot more can be added to the list), we need to enumerate some steps that can be used to secure virtualization in cloud computing.

The most neglected aspect of any organization is its physical security. An advanced social engineer can take advantage of weak physical-security policies an organization has put in place. Thus, it’s important to have a consistent, context-aware security policy when it comes to controlling access to a data center. Traffic between the virtual machines needs to be monitored closely by using at least a few standard monitoring tools.

After thoroughly enhancing physical security, it’s time to check security on the inside. A well-configured gateway should be able to enforce security when any virtual machine is reconfigured, migrated, or added. This will help prevent VM sprawls and rogue VMs. Another approach that might help enhance internal security is the use of third-party validation checks, performed in accordance with security standards.

Checking virtual systems for integrity increases the capabilities for monitoring and securing environments. One of the primary focuses of this integrity check should be the seamless integration of existing virtual systems like VMware and virtual box. This would lead to file integrity checking and increased protection against data losses within VMs. Involving agentless anti-malware intrusion detection and prevention in one single virtual appliance (unlike isolated point security solutions) would contribute greatly towards VM integrity checks. This will greatly reduce operational overhead while adding zero footprints.

A server on a cloud may be used to deploy web applications, and in this scenario, an OWASP top-ten vulnerability check will have to be performed. Data on a cloud should be encrypted with suitable encryption and data-protection algorithms. Using these algorithms, we can check the integrity of the user profile or system profile trying to access disk files on the VMs. Profiles lacking security protections can be considered infected by malware. Working with a system ratio of one user to one machine would also greatly reduce risks in virtual computing platforms. To enhance the security aspect even more, after a particular environment is used, it’s best to sanitize the system (reload) and destroy all the residual data. Using incoming IP addresses to determine scope on Windows-based machines, and using SSH configuration settings on Linux machines, will help maintain a secure one-to-one connection.

1. Provisioning VMM

VMM 2012 R2 must be deployed in order to provision VM’s VMM requirements can be found at this link.

VMM step by step deployment guide can be found here.

2. Configure VMM with Hosts

Configure Host Groups as per your resources and Add Hosts to the appropriate host groups. Information can be found here.

3. Configure VMM Networking

Deploy Logical Networks and IP Pools / Network Sites, Deploy VLANS / NVGRE where appropriate and Deploy Virtual Networks. Information can be found at this link.

4. Configure VMM Templates

Configure Hardware Profiles, Configure Guest OS Profile and Deploy VMM Templates.

5. Configure SPF 

Configure Service Account, Deploy SPF, Ensure SPF Account is a VMM Admin! And is a member off all the appropriate groups

Following are the three service model of cloud computing:

1. Software as a Service (SaaS)

2. Platform as a Service (PaaS)

3. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) 

1. Software as a Service (SaaS):

The capability provided to the consumer is to use the provider’s applications running on a cloud infrastructure2. The applications are accessible from various client devices through either a thin client interface, such as a web browser (e.g., web-based email), or a program interface. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, storage, or even individual application capabilities, with the possible exception of limited user-specific application configuration settings.

2. Platform as a Service (PaaS):

The capability provided to the consumer is to deploy onto the cloud infrastructure consumer-created or acquired applications created using programming languages, libraries, services, and tools supported by the provider.3 The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, or storage, but has control over the deployed applications and possibly configuration settings for the application-hosting environment.

3. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS):

The capability provided to the consumer is to provision processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources where the consumer is able to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can include operating systems and applications. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure but has control over operating systems, storage, and deployed applications; and possibly limited control of select networking components (e.g., host firewalls).

MapReduce is a processing technique and a program model for distributed computing based on java. The MapReduce algorithm contains two important tasks, namely Map and Reduce. The map takes a set of data and converts it into another set of data, where individual elements are broken down into tuples (key/value pairs). Secondly, reduce task, which takes the output from a map as an input and combines those data tuples into a smaller set of tuples. As the sequence of the name MapReduce implies, the reduce task is always performed after the map job.

The major advantage of MapReduce is that it is easy to scale data processing over multiple computing nodes. Under the MapReduce model, the data processing primitives are called mappers and reducers.      Decomposing a data processing application into mappers and reducers is sometimes nontrivial. But, once we write an application in the MapReduce form, scaling the application to run over hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of machines in a cluster is merely a configuration change. This simple scalability is what has attracted many programmers to use the MapReduce model.

Identity and access management (IAM) is a framework for business processes that facilitates the management of electronic or digital identities. The framework includes the organizational policies for managing digital identity as well as the technologies needed to support identity management.

With IAM technologies, IT managers can control user access to critical information within their organizations. Identity and access management products offer role-based access control, which lets system administrators regulate access to systems or networks based on the roles of individual users within the enterprise.

In this context, access is the ability of an individual user to perform a specific task, such as view, create or modify a file. Roles are defined according to job competency, authority, and responsibility within the enterprise.

Systems used for identity and access management include single sign-on systems, multifactor authentication, and access management. These technologies also provide the ability to securely store identity and profile data as well as data governance functions to ensure that only data that is necessary and relevant is shared.

These products can be deployed on-premises, provided by a third-party vendor via a cloud-based subscription model, or deployed in a hybrid cloud.

DaaS – Data as a Service :

Since you can get software as a service it seems reasonable to think you should be able to get data as a service as well. DaaS providers collect and make available data on a wide range of topics, from economics and finance to social media to climate science. Some DaaS providers offer application programming interfaces (APIs) can provide on demand access to data when bulk downloads are not sufficient.

Network as a Service (Naas):

Network as a Service (NaaS) is sometimes listed as a separate Cloud provider along with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). This factors out networking, firewalls, related security, etc. from IaaS.

NaaS can include flexible and extended Virtual Private Network (VPN), bandwidth on demand, custom routing, multicast protocols, security firewall, intrustions detection and prevention, Wide Area Network (WAN), content monitoring and filtering, and antivirus. There is no standard specification as to what is included in NaaS. Implementations vary.

"Cloud computing” means accessing computer capacity and programming facilities online or "in the cloud". Customers are spared the expense of purchasing, installing, and maintaining hardware and software locally.

Customers can easily expand or reduce IT capacity according to their needs. This essentially transforms computing into an on-demand utility. An added boon is that data can be accessed and processed from anywhere via the Internet.

Unfortunately, consumers and companies are often reluctant to take advantage of cloud computing services either because contracts are unclear or are unbalanced in favor of service providers. Existing regulations and national contract laws may not always be adapted to cloud-based services. The protection of personal data in a cloud environment also needs to be addressed. Adapting contract law is therefore an important part of the Commission’s cloud computing strategy.

Safe and fair contracts for cloud computing

The Commission is working towards cloud computing contracts that contain safe and fair terms and conditions for all parties. On 18 June 2013, the Commission set up a group of experts to define safe and fair conditions and identify best practices for cloud computing contracts. The Commission has also launched a comparative study on cloud computing contracts to supplement the work of the Expert Group.

Cloud computing security challenges fall into three broad categories:

Data Protection: Securing your data both at rest and in transit

User Authentication: Limiting access to data and monitoring who accesses the data

Disaster and Data Breach: Contingency Planning

Data Protection

Implementing a cloud computing strategy means placing critical data in the hands of a third party, so ensuring the data remains secure both at rest (data residing on storage media) as well as when in transit is of paramount importance. Data needs to be encrypted at all times, with clearly defined roles when it comes to who will be managing the encryption keys. In most cases, the only way to truly ensure the confidentiality of encrypted data that resides on a cloud provider's storage servers is for the client to own and manage the data encryption keys.

User Authentication

Data resting in the cloud needs to be accessible only by those authorized to do so, making it critical to both restrict and monitor who will be accessing the company's data through the cloud. In order to ensure the integrity of user authentication, companies need to be able to view data access logs and audit trails to verify that only authorized users are accessing the data. These access logs and audit trails additionally need to be secured and maintained for as long as the company needs or legal purposes require. As with all cloud computing security challenges, it's the responsibility of the customer to ensure that the cloud provider has taken all necessary security measures to protect the customer's data and access to that data.

Contingency Planning

With the cloud serving as a single centralized repository for a company's mission-critical data, the risks of having that data compromised due to a data breach or temporarily made unavailable due to a natural disaster are real concerns. Much of the liability for the disruption of data in a cloud ultimately rests with the company whose mission-critical operations depend on that data, although liability can and should be negotiated in a contract with the services provider prior to commitment. A comprehensive security assessment from a neutral third-party is strongly recommended as well.

Companies need to know how their data is being secured and what measures the service provider will be taking to ensure the integrity and availability of that data should the unexpected occur. Additionally, companies should also have contingency plans in place in the event their cloud provider fails or goes bankrupt. Can the data be easily retrieved and migrated to a new service provider or to a non-cloud strategy if this happens? And what happens to the data and the ability to access that data if the provider gets acquired by another company?

Cloud infrastructure refers to a virtual infrastructure that is delivered or accessed via a network or the internet. This usually refers to the on-demand services or products being delivered through the model known as infrastructure as a service (IaaS), a basic delivery model of cloud computing. This is a highly automated offering where computing resources complemented with storage and networking services are provided to the user. In essence, users have an IT infrastructure that they can use for themselves without ever having to pay for the construction of a physical infrastructure.

Cloud Infrastructure

Cloud infrastructure is one of the most basic products delivered by cloud computing services through the IaaS model. Through the service, users can create their own IT infrastructure complete with processing, storage, and networking fabric resources that can be configured in any way, just as with a physical data center enterprise infrastructure. In most cases, this provides more flexibility in infrastructure design, as it can be easily set up, replaced, or deleted as opposed to a physical one, which requires manual work, especially when network connectivity needs to be modified or reworked.

Cloud infrastructure includes virtual machines and components such as:

• Virtual servers
• Virtual PCs
• Virtual network switches/hubs/routers
• Virtual memory
• Virtual storage clusters

All of these elements combine to create a full IT infrastructure that works just as well as a physical one, but boasts such benefits as:

• Low barrier to entry
• Low capital requirement
• The low total cost of ownership
• Flexibility
• Scalability

Security in any system involves primarily ensuring that the right entity gets access to only the authorized data in the authorized format at an authorized time and from an authorized location. Identity and access management (IAM) is of prime importance in this regard as far as Indian businesses are concerned. This effort should be complemented by the maintenance of audit trails for the entire chain of events from users logging in to the system, getting authenticated, and accessing files or running applications as authorized.

Even in a closed, internal environment with a well-established “trust boundary”, managing an Active Directory server, an LDAP server or other alternatives is no easy task. And for IAM in the cloud, the challenges and problems are magnified many times over. An Indian organization moving to the cloud could typically have applications hosted on the cloud and a database maintained internally, with users logging on and getting authenticated internally on a local Active Directory server. Just imagine attempting single sign-on (SSO) functionality in such a scenario! Cloud delivery models comprising mainly SaaS, PaaS and IaaS require seamless integration between cloud services and the organization’s IAM practices, processes, and procedures, in a scalable, effective and efficient manner.

Identity provisioning challenges

The biggest challenge for cloud services is identity provisioning. This involves secure and timely management of onboarding (provisioning) and off-boarding (de-provisioning) of users in the cloud.

When a user has successfully authenticated to the cloud, a portion of the system resources in terms of CPU cycles, memory, storage, and network bandwidth is allocated. Depending on the capacity identified for the system, these resources are made available on the system even if no users have been logged on. Based on projected capacity requirements, cloud architects may decide on a 1:4 scale or even 1:2 or lower ratios. If projections are exceeded and more users log on, the system performance may be affected drastically. Simultaneously, adequate measures need to be in place to ensure that as usage of the cloud drops, system resources are made available for other objectives; else they will remain unused and constitute a dead investment.

1. Installation of Windows Azure SDK
2. Developing First Windows Azure Web Application
3. Deploying application locally in Development Storage Fabric
4. Registration for free Windows Azure Trial
5. Deployment of the Application in Microsoft Data Center

I will start fresh with installation of Windows Azure SDK and I will conclude this post with deployment of simple application in Windows Azure Hosted Service. I am not going to create a complex application since purpose of this post is to walkthrough with all the steps from installation, development, debugging to deployment. In further post we will get into more complex applications. Proceed through rest of the post to create your first application for Windows Azure.