A Study of Cloud Computing With Special Reference to Cloud Based Accounting

Cloud computing is a Service Oriented Architecture which reduced information technology overhead for the end-user and provide great flexibility, reduced total cost of ownership, on-demand services and many other things [1]. Hence it delivered all IT related capability as services rather than product .Services on cloud are divided into three broad categories: Software as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service & Platform as a Service. Same as services cloud is also classified as Private Cloud, Public Cloud & Hybrid Cloud. Private cloud is increasingly become popular between every private organization either large or small wants .To deploy public or private cloud there are many open source software available some are Eucalyptus, Nimbus, OpenStack, Open Nebula Cloud stack and Amazon Web Services .This paper, I provide a study of the main open source software such as Eucalyptus, OpenStack and OpenNebula for cloud implementation. It is believe that the comparison presented in this paper would benefit developers in selecting best open source Software.

Despite the promising application of cloud computing within government organisations, determining the barriers to the successful implementation of cloud computing remains a major challenge. Often, government organisations face formidable barriers to fully adopting cloud computing functions. These barriers include organisational culture issues, a weak application of service-level agreements (SLAs), compliance issues, interoperability and integration issues, the lack of an organisational strategy, cost calculation methods, cloud service availability, and cloud data security and privacy, as well as insufficient trust in providers. Tackling these barriers while meeting the specifications of government cloud computing involves architectural requirements and mechanisms. In addition, the nature of cloud ecosystem operation and its alignment with appropriate strategies are known to be complex, also considering the growing desire for governance solutions. Although researchers and organisations have recognised cloud computing obstacles prior to the cloud implementation stage, fewer efforts have been made to investigate cloud barriers in-depth during and after cloud implementation projects or when introducing governance solutions. This might partly be attributable to inadequate enterprise requirements for addressing cloud barriers, the complexity of government cloud specifications, and the lack of involvement by cloud stakeholders, such as providers and consumers. Thus, the aim of this dissertation is to develop a governance method consisting of the generation and testing of architectural requirements to overcome dominant cloud barriers and improve cloud computing functionalities in the implementation stage. To achieve this, the roles of related cloud providers and consumers have been investigated. The study was guided by activities of The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) Architecture Development Method (ADM) to design related architectural requirements that would provide best practices for the development of the governance method. Using a sequential, exploratory mixed method, multiple qualitative case studies on the role of cloud providers were conducted to explore which and how architectural requirements are suitable and applicable for addressing the identified cloud barriers. Afterwards, a quantitative survey study was performed to examine and validate the findings from the qualitative phase and to discover the role of cloud consumers in tackling cloud barriers. The utilisation of dual perspectives, from cloud providers and consumers, to design and measure the suitability and applicability of the architectural requirements is a substantial theoretical contribution in the field of enterprise information systems and cloud governance. Both cloud providers and consumers in the selected research context balanced their roles in the composition of cloud ecosystem projects, reducing complexity and enabling cooperative solutions for handling cloud barriers with different levels of emphasis and prioritisation. The results of this thesis provide significant guidance in eliciting architectural requirements as well as in their successful contribution to addressing the 10 identified cloud barriers in the selected context. Seeking a cloud provider’s perspective through multiple case studies resulted in 24 confirmed, newly emerged architectural requirements and 48 sub-requirements for best practices to support Information Technology (IT) managers and practitioners during the implementation of government cloud projects. From the point of view of the cloud service consumer, statistical evidence showed that the architectural requirements proved to be relevant and applicable and resulted in the validation of only eight important cloud constructs with a scale of 36 architectural requirements. The results at the governance level also produced a clear method that can enhance the realisation of value when business/IT strategies and EA governance practices both take place in cloud projects. The governance method also consists of a set of architectural requirements to support managing and controlling cloud computing implementation projects with related stakeholders and change management initiatives. The architectural requirements have been modelled via the ArchiMate 3.0 modelling language as unique and beneficial contributions for the enhancement of enterprise architecture practices. This thesis thereby introduces a novel cloud governance method with clear mechanisms and practices to serve as crucial resources for related organisations, decision-makers, business practitioners and researchers.

Business process modelling is an important part of system design. When designing or redesigning a business process, stakeholders specify, negotiate, and agree on business requirements to be satisfied, including non-functional requirements that concern the quality of the business process. This thesis addresses the question of how to specify and compute the quality of a business process, given the model that stakeholders use. The motivation for this thesis is the increasing importance of the quality of business processes. Knowing the quality of specific business processes enables stakeholders to judge if these processes need improvement. Knowing the quality of the constructs of those processes (viz., events, inputs, activities, and outputs) and the way they are structured enables a more detailed analysis of their shortcomings and provides a basis for the design of improvements. The research challenge of this thesis is grounded in the assumption that: “Organisations need an appropriate means to effectively compute achievement of their goals and objectives by their business processes.” Given this challenge, the main research question on which this thesis focuses is: “Can the quality of a business process be computed quantitatively at different levels of granularity?” The research objective is: “To develop frameworks, factors, and metrics for computing non-functional requirements (quality) of business processes quantitatively at different levels of granularity.” The outcomes of this thesis are: 1) BPIMM, a language-independent business process integrating meta-model, based on the concepts of seven mainstream business process modelling languages: BPMN, EPC, RAD, UML AD, SADT, IDEF0, and IDEF3. 2) BPC-QC (Business Process Concept - Quality Computation), an approach to quality computation at the lowest level of granularity of a business process. The approach consists of: i. BPC-QEF (Business Process Concept - Quality Evaluation Framework), a language-independent generic framework and algorithm to compute the quality of the constructs of a business process: event, input, activity, and output. ii. A set of business process quality dimensions and factors. The following quality dimensions are distinguished: performance, efficiency, reliability, recoverability, permissibility, and availability. Each dimension categorises different quality aspects in terms of factors. A non-exhaustive set of sixteen quantitative factors is provided. iii. Quality metrics for each of the quality factors, to facilitate a quantitative computation of the quality of a specific construct of a business process. 3) BP-QC (Business Process - Quality Computation), an approach to compute the quality at the highest level of granularity of a business process. The approach consists of: i. BP-CQCF (Business Process - Compositional Quality Computation Framework), a language-independent generic framework and algorithm to compute the quality of a business process as a whole, given the quality of its constructs. ii. A set of generic business process modelling patterns to decompose a business process into more succinct parts, namely: sequential, parallel with synchronisation, exclusive, inclusive, simple loop, and complex loop. iii. A set of over one hundred computational formulae. For each combination of modelling pattern and a quality factor, there is a formula to compute the quality. 4) AAV (Approach to Application and Validation), an evaluation plan to evaluate BPIMM, BPC-QC and BP-QC in practice, together with expert stakeholders. The plan consists of the units of measure, a measurement model, and a case study procedure. To evaluate the applicability of the contributions of this thesis to real world business needs, four case studies have been conducted in different environments: a Dutch educational institution, a global financial institution, an international financial service provider, and a Dutch research project on crisis management. Each of these case studies concerns a different, single business process. This thesis shows that: 1) A quality computation approach can be adopted independent of a business process modelling language. 2) Quantitative quality factors can be introduced specifically for the constructs of a business process. 3) Quantitative metrics and computational formulae can be developed for specific quality factors, allowing the computation of different aspects of the quality of a business process quantitatively at different levels of granularity. 4) An evaluation plan can be developed to evaluate the applicability of the contributions of this thesis (viz., BPIMM, BPC-QC, and BP-QC). The contributions of this thesis are designed to be beneficial to the areas of business and management, requirements engineering, software engineering, and business process modelling. In the areas of requirements engineering and software engineering, these contributions are intended to help practitioners to consider non-functional requirements at the earliest stage. In the area of business process modelling, information systems, service computing, and cloud computing, the contributions can be used for quality-driven modelling, design, and redesign. To conclude, knowing the quality value of a business process at different levels of granularity provides a basis for its improvement.

Cloud computing offers cost effective services on-demand which encourage critical infrastructure providers to consider migrating to the cloud. Critical infrastructures are considered as a backbone of modern societies such as power plants and water. Information in cloud computing is likely to be shared among different entities, which could have various degrees of sensitivity. This requires robust isolation and access control mechanisms. Although various access control models and policies have been developed, they cannot fulfil requirements for a cloud based access control system. The reason is that cloud computing has a diverse sets of security requirements and unique security challenges such as multi-tenant and heterogeneity of security policies, rules and domains. This thesis provides a detailed study of cloud computing security challenges and threats, which were used to identify security requirements for various critical infrastructure providers. We found that an access control system is a crucial security requirement for the surveyed critical infrastructure providers. Furthermore, the requirement analysis was used to propose a new criteria to evaluate access control systems for cloud computing. Moreover, this work presents a new cloud based access control model to meet the identified cloud access control requirements. The model does not only ensure the secure sharing of resources among potential untrusted tenants, but also has the capacity to support different access permissions for the same cloud user. Our focused in the proposed model is the lack of data isolation in lower levels (CPU caches), which could lead to bypass access control models to gain some sensitive information by using cache side-channel attacks. Therefore, the thesis investigates various real attack scenarios and the gaps in existing mitigation approaches. It presents a new Prime and Probe cache side-channel attack, which can give detailed information about addresses accessed by a virtual machine with no need for any information about cache sets accessed by the virtual machine. The design, implementation and evaluation of a proposed solution preventing cache side-channel attacks are also presented in the thesis. It is a new lightweight solution, which introduces very low overhead (less than 15,000 CPU cycles). It can be applied in any operating system and prevents cache side-channel attacks in cloud computing. The thesis also presents a new detecting cache side-channel attacks solution. It focuses on the infrastructure used to host cloud computing tenants by counting cache misses caused by a virtual machine. The detection solutions has 0% false negative and 15% false positive.

Cloud computing has different meaning to different people, the privacy and security issues also differ between a consumer using a public cloud application, a medium-sized Company using a customized Design of business on a cloud platform, and Some Companies are using Platform on Public level which are Public to Public Network The security requirements in cloud computing environment is to find the Security threats in the Structure of clouds To find the security solutions, and finding basis so that Pre Security Step Should be taken in concerned with security future model. In this paper is to build a trusted computing environment for cloud computing system by Combining the trusted computing platform into cloud computing system Which is free from attacks and threats and system is designed with a model system in which cloud computing system is combined with trusted computing platform and trusted platform models. Keywords: cloud computing, data breaches, Api Attack Deniel Attack, Account high Jacking, Deniel of Services

The concept of the digital divide is becoming more and more complex as access to computers and the use of computers, changes over time. When the existence of a “digital divide” first emerged, it revolved around access to computers and related technologies. The high cost of computers and related technologies creates a large divide between people who could afford them, and who had access to all the advantages of Information technology in general, and those who could not. ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) have become an indispensable tool for businesses. Competitiveness and productivity depend on them. Cloud Computing has also generated new business opportunities for companies that have understood the key to this new social and commercial space. Cloud Computing on education can bridge the knowledge divide, the resource divide and the digital divide, teachers could be empowered under the cloud warning. It can be on devices, notebook, e-book and cell-phone. Cloud Computing in order to reduce digital divide has come as a friendly way to provide computer applications to users without the need for those users to purchase, install or support software on their local computers and/or servers. This research will cover the facts and issues discovered into the Digital Divide, after exploring details and points of views from experts. Also, this research will provide two models and one framework to describe, explain and finally reduce the gap or as most of the researchers has been looking for building a bridge in order to reduce the digital divide. Since computers and, later, the Internet became popular and came to our business, there has been a different degree of acceptance thereof by the people. The variety of profiles ranging from the 'early adopter', that is one that is to last forever in this new technology, to the 'allergic' to the computer, because they do not know how to use password to login and/or prefers to work as they always have done. Is not the first time we hear about people who cannot make simples actions in a computer because their capabilities are very low. I'm talking about everyday situations, rather than more complex ones such as maintenance of machinery. This research will treat the Cloud Computing concept as a tool to Reduce Digital Divide; the digital divide will be related to issues of educational access to the benefits of digitalization and the capabilities of a group of students in three different high school centers to use ICT appropriately and contribute to sustainable development.

Over the past years, Thai small and medium enterprises (SME) had to deal with changing economic situations and had to adapt to new technological evolutions, representing new challenges as well as new opportunities for doing business. With the forthcoming ASEAN Economic Community 2015, Thai SMEs will face an increase in competition and, as a possible solution, may have to adopt new information systems to remain competitive. The objectives of this study are (1) to identify the factors facilitating or hindering the adoption of cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems by Thai SMEs and to (2) provide an analysis of the adoption and the implementation strategies. The research is based on a qualitative exploratory approach, relying on semistructured interviews with IT experts, IT managers and business owners to collect data, and on the template analysis method to analyze the data. Respondents have identified trust, cost control and the security of financial data as the most important factors for the adoption and selection of on-premise and cloud-based ERP systems. The adoption rate of cloud-based solutions appears to be low and local ERP providers face the challenge to discover the reasons why business owners do not adopt their solutions. First generation business owners prepare the transition to the next generation and want to better organize and structure how their businesses operates, but their own confidence in the technology still limit the adoption pace and the decision process. SMEs' strategies usually consist in a step-by-step implementation, consolidating the changes and readjusting the goals in case of setbacks, minimizing the consequences. ERP providers' strategies focus on new offerings with enhanced features and slowly integrate change management and extended support. Keywords: ERP, Cloud Computing, Small and Medium Enterprise (SME), Mobile App, Open Source, Organizational Innovation Adoption model.

Cloud computing has caused a revolution in how companies do business giving them flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency like never before. It lets organizations use computing resources through the internet instead of relying on the usual in-house setup making cloud computing a key part of today's IT plans. From new startups to big global companies, businesses are using cloud solutions more and more to boost their ability to adapt cut down on running costs, and come up with new ideas. The cloud ecosystem is big and varied, with different deployment models and service types to suit various business needs. Public, private, and hybrid clouds are the three main deployment models each with its own pros and cons. public clouds, like those from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, offer affordable scalability and global reach. Private clouds, on the other hand, are for organizations that have strict security or compliance needs giving them dedicated environments. Hybrid clouds mix the best parts of both letting businesses find a balance between security and scalability by combining private and public cloud resources

Cloud computing is a hot technology now, is a new business model. The use of cloud computing to businesses in many industries, especially e-commerce has brought new opportunities, However, due to the characteristics of its own cloud computing and the Internet network security flaws, Resulting in e-commerce system security weaknesses. This paper describes the cloud computing and security issues of cloud computing in the e-commerce, Through e-commerce security needs analysis, Proposed ensuring e-commerce security methods in the cloud.

Purpose– Cloud Computing (CC) technology is getting implemented rapidly in the educational sector to improve learning, research and other administrative process. As evident from the literature review, most of these implementations are happening in the western countries such as USA, UK, while the level of implementation of CC in developing countries such as India is rare. Moreover, implementing CC technology in the educational sector require various decisions to be made by the managers of the Information Technology (IT) department such as selecting suitable deployment model, vendor providing cloud service, etc. in their respective university or institute. The purpose of this paper is to attempt to address one such decision. Since, different types of CC deployment are available; selecting a suitable one plays a key role, as it might have an impact on the requirements of various stakeholders such as students, teachers, administrative staff (especially the staff members in the IT department), etc. apart from affecting the overall performance of the facilities such as a laboratory. Naturally, a proper decision by analysing multiple perspectives has to be made while carrying out such strategic initiatives by any educational institute.Design/methodology/approach– A case study methodology has been chosen as the research methodology to discuss and demonstrate the above decision problem that was faced in real time by one of the educational institutes in India, offering high-quality management education. The IT managers of this institute were planning to switch over to CC technology for the computer laboratory and they have to make a decision of choosing suitable alternative CC deployment models such as private cloud (PRC), public cloud (PUC), community cloud (COC), hybrid cloud (HYC), etc. by analysing and comparing them based on various factors and perspectives such as elasticity, availability, scalability, etc. Since, multiple factors are involved in making such a strategic decision, the most commonly used Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) model – namely, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used as a decision support during the decision making process.Findings– The team of decision makers, who were planning to implement CC in the case institute, found that PRC is best as they believed that it would provide adequate cost savings, apart from providing necessary security to maintain confidential information such as student's detail, grades, etc.Research limitations/implications– The results obtained are based on a single case study. Hence, they cannot be generalized for institutions across educational sector. However, the decision making situation and understanding its impact on the stakeholders of the educational institute can be common across various educational institute.Practical implications– Using a real-life case study of an educational institute, this paper presented a strategic decision making situation, which needs to be considered by the IT managers of the educational institutes when they decide to switch over to CC technology. Various criteria to be considered during the decision making process was identified from the literature review were identified and enumerated. These factors would useful for the IT managers of the different educational institute and they can suitably add or delete these decision criteria as per their requirements and situation at hand. Moreover, the algorithm of AHP, which was used as a decision support, was presented in a step-by-step manner, which should be beneficial for the practitioners to apply the same for similar decision making situations.Originality/value– It is believed that this paper would be the first to report on a strategic decision of choosing the deployment model for CC technology especially in the educational sector. Similarly, this paper would also contribute to the field of CC, as it lists out the decision criteria that are to be considered for making the above decision, which has not got adequate importance. Lastly, this paper is also unique in the realm of AHP because application for a decision problem in the field of CC especially in the educational sector is least reported.

Cloud computing is next generation of Internet technology and data centers. As such, Information security (IS) has become one of the most essential issues of data center security on the cloud computing, but we cannot rely solely on single solution to support all of the necessary features of IS. Therefore, we need to a new information security service model, called Security Operation Center (SOC). It can support online interactions and remote monitoring via network operations in data centers. The SOC is required to integrate related IS technologies based on security policies. In this paper, we propose the service level agreement (SLA) strategy for designing the SOC platform to meet the IS requirements of any organization in cloud computing. Therefore, the main purposes of this paper are to propose the framework of SLA strategy and the integration technology for designing an SOC platform. The SOC platform with SLA is to handle and supervise all the security service processes under different levels of cloud security enforcements according to data center scales, business properties, and existing IS functions. Consequently, the SLA strategy and integrating technology of IS can be the reference model for designing a proposed SOC platform in data centers on the cloud computing.

In cloud computing, private cloud tends to exhibit high controllability but lack scalability, whereas public cloud is just the opposite. The hybrid cloud formed by combining them can effectively balance controllability and scalability, and has been widely adopted in industry for executing workflows. The network connecting public and private clouds goes through Internet and its bandwidth is rather limited in comparison with that inside clouds. Hence, cross-cloud data transmission can become a bottleneck of executing workflows in such environment. Moreover, multiple data communications may contend for bandwidth resources, thereby incurring delay. To address these concerns, this work establishes a scheduling model for workflow execution across public and private clouds, where a queueing mode is innovatively employed to address potential network communication contention. A contention-cognizant list scheduling (CCLS) heuristic equipped with task duplication is devised to minimize workflow makespan. It adopts a novel task sorting attribute to schedule tasks and cross-cloud data communications by using available computation and communication resources, and employs task duplication to obviate the needs for certain data communications. Experiments are conducted with realistic workflows and diverse settings, and the results verify the superiority of CCLS over the existing ones as it can always achieve the best makespan <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Note to Practitioners</i> —A crucial challenge for workflow scheduling across public and private clouds is that the cross-cloud bandwidth resource is relatively limited and multiple data communications may contend for it in practice. However, this communication contention issue has largely been neglected in existing investigations. To advance the state of the art, this paper proposes a communication contention-cognizant scheduling approach based on a queueing mode to minimize the makespan for workflow execution across public and private clouds. The proposed approach can be readily put into use and experimental results show that it performs better than traditional scheduling approaches that fail to consider communication contention.

After years of development, cloud computing has developed into public cloud, private cloud, community cloud, hybrid cloud and other cloud forms. However, the government, financial and other industries have more concerns about security, operation and maintenance, cost and other issues in the process of cloud. In this regard, the industry, academia and other parties have launched the frontier exploration, give different solutions. To meet users’ new needs, we proposed a new model that combines the advantages of public and private clouds. It is called proprietary cloud. Proprietary cloud provides users with more efficient management by incorporating years of experience of public cloud providers. On the one hand, it meets the rigid needs of users’ independent control and exclusive resources, on the other hand, it reduces the maintenance cost and downtime probability of users, and achieves the desired effect of users. It mainly includes self-built model and exclusive model deployment modes. The main difference is whether to accept public cloud management. This paper introduces and analyzes proprietary cloud in detail from the aspects of deployment architecture, mode differences and common deployment patterns. It concludes that proprietary cloud is an indispensable cloud computing deployment pattern in the future.KeywordsCloud computingDigital transformationProprietary cloud

The new model of interaction suggested by Cloud Computing has experienced a significant diffusion over the last years thanks to its capability of providing customers with the illusion of an infinite amount of reliable resources. Nevertheless, the challenge of efficiently manage a large collection of virtual computing nodes has just been partially moved from the customer's private datacenter to the larger provider's infrastructure that we generally address as “the cloud”. A lot of effort - in both academic and industrial field - is therefore concentrated on policies for the efficient and autonomous management of virtual infrastructures. The research on this topic is further encouraged by the diffusion of cheap and portable sensors and the availability of almost ubiquitous Internet connectivity that are constantly creating large flows of information about the environment we live in. The need for fast and reliable mechanisms to process these considerable volumes of data has inevitably pushed the evolution from the initial scenario of a single (private or public) cloud towards cloud interoperability, giving birth to several forms of collaboration between clouds. The efficient resource management is further complicated in these heterogeneous environments, making autonomous administration more and more desirable. In this thesis, we initially focus on the challenges of autonomic management in a single-cloud scenario, considering the benefits and shortcomings of centralized and distributed solutions and proposing an original decentralized model. Later in this dissertation, we face the challenge of autonomic management in large interconnected cloud environments, where the movement of virtual resources across the infrastructure nodes is further complicated by the intrinsic heterogeneity of the scenario and difficulties introduced by the higher latency medium between datacenters. According to that, we focus on the cost model for the execution of distributed data-intensive application on multiple clouds and we propose different management policies leveraging cloud interoperability.

As cloud computing becomes more common, there is growing need for studies to consider various factors that either facilitate or hinder its adoption in an effort to reduce the hesitation some firms have shown about adopting innovative systems and thus establishing cloud computing at a company-wide level. We used the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) for analysis and employed the technology, organization, and environment (TOE) framework, which takes the enterprise perspective, as the second hierarchy. All of the groups regarded new business opportunities as the most important facilitating factor, indicating that they focused more on how they could use cloud computing after adopting it than on the technology itself. The most important hindering factor was information protection weaknesses. Firms that adopt innovative technologies strictly for cost-saving purposes may face serious difficulties. Consistent with this argument, this study's results indicate that cost saving has no substantial impact on an enterprise's decision to adopt cloud computing. A number of participants mentioned that the cost of adopting cloud computing was not an important factor.