Cloud Computing Architecture: A Critical Analysis

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.

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

Cloud computing is a promising technology, where the infrastructure, developing platform, software and storage are delivered as a service. With the development of cloud computing, more and more cloud service providers emerge. However, there are no metrics can be referred to compare these providers, so it is difficult for cloud consumers to select the most reliable providers or resources. Thus we present a platform of Services Level Agreement (SLA) in cloud computing. In the platform, we propose a Reputation System to evaluate the reliability of providers or resources to address this challenge, and we also propose a SLA template pool in order to make the SLA negotiation between cloud providers and cloud consumers become more equitable, transparent and convenient.

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 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

Accessing data from social networks using cloud computing has been adopted by many IT enthusiasts. It allows easy access to data and easy sending of data for communication purposes. For many social network users, cloud computing can simplify processes and save time and money. This article defines cloud computing and shows how one can quickly, safely and easily access data. It also discusses how cloud computing solutions could be beneficial to libraries in these basic areas: technology and acquisition.Today’s more libraries and social networks are joining the cloud. But despite the numerous social networks and data acquisition sites demand for data are still escalating—as they always will. To be able to access data conveniently today’s data competitiveness users of search engines must carefully scrutinize various libraries as well as social media to ensure that they match key data and communication needs and deliver intended results in the most efficient and cost-effective way. To meet these challenges, IT organizations are increasingly moving away from a device-centric view of IT, to a view that is application-, information- and people-centric. Cloud computing aligns with this new world view. Cloud computing technology is enabling IT to do more with the infrastructure that already exists, as well as adding new ways to expand capacity quickly and economically by using external cloud computing resources. This technology is enabling IT managers to treat infrastructure as a common substrate on which they can provision services to users faster in a much more flexible and cost-effective way –without having to re-design or add to the underlying infrastructure. Given the benefits of cloud computing, its broad appeal is not surprising. However, this new approach does raise some concerns. Chief among them is securing data in the cloud. This white paper will briefly review the basic fundamentals of cloud computing and describe how virtualization are enabling enterprises to move toward a flexible, federated computing model with a cohesive mix of private external and internal cloud environments. It then discusses the security implications of cloud computing and provides insights into addressing them, and offers a view of security best practices to adopt when considering cloud services.Cloud computing has become an increasingly popular means of delivering valuable, IT-enabled business services. Adopting cloud technology can be an affordable way to get access to a dynamically scalable, virtualized computing environment. Optimal IT hardware, software, expertise and infrastructure management resources that may not otherwise be available from a cost perspective can be rapidly deployed and easily scaled. Processes, applications and services can be available on demand, regard-less of the user location or device. The cloud provider is responsible for the environment, so organizations can make use of resources for short periods of time without having to maintain the environment when it is not being used. While cloud computing models are attractive because of their flexibility and cost effectiveness, certain challenges must be addressed in order to provide a viable option to traditional data services. First and foremost is the issue of security. The externalized aspect of outsourcing can make it harder to maintain data integrity and privacy, support data and service availability, demonstrate compliance, and secure highly available access to applications and information. In short, cloud computing can present an added level of risk. Organizations must therefore establish trust relationships with their cloud computing providers and understand risk in terms of how these providers implement, deploy, and manage security on their behalf. Whether delivered as part of the service or as specific components added in, your cloud provider should address the fundamentals of security and risk management through a comprehensive approach.

Infrastructures for High-Performance Computing: Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing is the hottest research area today because of its ability to reduce costs associated with computing while increasing scalability and flexibility for computing services. Cloud computing is Internet based computing because it provides on demand dynamically to consumers by sharing resources and providing information to the software. Cloud Computing is one of the fastest growing technology IT trade for business. Cloud computing security has become a major cause of hindrance in its development. Cloud computing security is set of policies, procedure, controls, roles, permissions and technologies that work together to protect cloud based system and data. Cloud computing security has become a latest topic in academic research and industry because Cloud users have to save their data in the cloud so lack of security in the cloud cans loss the user’s trust. This paper discusses review of security in cloud computing. The study is based on all the levels of SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and the deployment model (Private, Public, Hybrid, and community cloud.

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are the means through which the provision of infrastructure, platform, and software services in Cloud Computing is regulated, along with functional and non-functional specifications of services. SLAs are intended to set a framework for the provision of services and for the cooperation between service providers and service consumers. Currently, Cloud SLAs are usually drafted by Cloud providers and do not allow much negotiation. Therefore, it becomes critical to analyze and assess if, and to what extent, the rights and the expectations of Cloud users (in particular private consumers and small and medium-sized enterprises) are respected by these SLAs and by existing legal mechanisms. With this perspective, in this chapter, we analyze whether the current Cloud SLAs are sufficiently in accordance with rights (if any) and business expectations of users in protecting their data concerns and whether they are able to establish trust between Cloud consumers and Cloud providers.

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.

Cloud technologies are becoming pervasive and available for private companies or public institutions in different flavors, mostly public cloud or private clouds. Our focus in this work is on the usage of public cloud technologies by the most popular sites in the Internet. While some studies have described the nascent landscape of public cloud computing 5 years ago, surprising little effort has been put to study the recent evolution of this domain.Using DNS data that enables us to map domains (e.g., netflix.com) and their subdomains (e.g., api.netflix.com) with the cloud providers actually used, we refresh our understanding of this ecosystem. We focus on the dominant four cloud providers, namely Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Computing and IBM Bluemix. We demonstrate that cloud penetration has clearly increased since 2013, reaching almost 50% of the top 1000 domains, from the Alexa list. Furthermore, a significant fraction of domains use multiple cloud providers simultaneously. Still, domain owenrs remain cautious when it comes to choose which subdomain is actually hosted in the cloud and only 17.8% on average of the subdomains are actually hosted in the cloud. In terms of performance, preliminary results indicate that hosting a subdomain in the cloud pays off as compared to private hosting with a decrease of application level latency of 28%.

Big Data is a data analysis methodology made possible by current technological and architectural advancements. However, big data requires a significant investment in hardware and processing power, making it prohibitively expensive for small and medium-sized firms to implement. Small and medium-sized enterprises can benefit from cloud computing promise of big data implementation. The MapReduce programming paradigm is used to process large amounts of data. The MapReduce paradigm typically necessitates networked connected storage and parallel computation. The computing requirements of MapReduce programming are frequently beyond the capabilities of small and medium-sized businesses. Cloud computing is network access to computing resources on demand, given by a third party Hardware cost reduction, processing cost reduction, and the flexibility to verify the value of big data are three significant reasons for small and medium-sized organizations to embrace cloud computing for big data technology implementation. Security and loss of control are two main concerns with cloud computing. Key Words: Big data, MapReduce, cloud computing, private cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud.

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.

Cloud Computing is an emerging paradigm which has become today's hottest research area due to its ability to reduce the costs associated with computing. Cloud computing is most interesting and enticing technology which is offering the services to its users on demand over the internet. Since Cloud Computing stores the data and disseminated resources in the open environment, security has become the main obstacle which is hampering the deployment of Cloud environments. Even though the Cloud Computing is promising and efficient, there are many challenges for data security as there is no vicinity of the data for the Cloud user. The main scope of this paper is to solve the security issues in both cloud providers and cloud consumers. The outcome of the research paper is securing cloud data storage by using modulo 37, but existing hill cipher working with modulo 26.

The century we are living in is the age of technology and innovations. Without getting compatible with such techniques, a business finds itself hard to survive, so to remain competitive in the industry and reap unique benefits, one must not hesitate to use modern technology in processing of its business operations. As a business understands the language of accounting, making it mandatory for every company to have a comprehensive understanding of its technical aspects to reap the benefits of today’s market. Accounting is an information system as s part of the significant management information system provides the organisation with information on various aspects. Cloud Accounting allows accounting managers to access financial information from anyplace in the world round the clock leading to no geographical and infrastructural boundaries. This paper focuses on comprehending the term cloud computing, current scenario and prospect in cloud computing, and will likewise make comparative analyses between conventional accounting and cloud accounting. Keywords: Cloud computing, Accounting, Software as a service (SaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), Platform as a service (PaaS), Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, On-Premises, Hosted solutions. Cite this Article Ashwani Kumar, Himanshu Kushwaha. A Study of Cloud Computing with Special Reference to Cloud-Based Accounting. E - Commerce for Future & Trends . 2018; 5(3): 15–24p.