Development of Digital Forensic Framework for Joint Heterogeneous Cloud Computing Platforms

Data Portability: Key to Cloud Portability and Interoperability

The IT Industry and the wider media are abuzz with the phrase “cloud computing” and most of us have no idea what this latest terminology means. This paper starts by addressing the question – “what is cloud computing, and provides an understanding of the technology?” Cloud computing is related to technologies that has been around for ages, however, what can be done differently with the same technology when integrated with Internet is cloud computing.Individuals who might be considering cloud computing services for personal use will also benefit by the information provided. Web sites like Flickr, FaceBook, YouTube and others are used to store and share personal photos, music and videos for free. Easy as: 1). Register, 2). Upload, 3). Share. Free and easy, there has to be a downside, and there is awareness regarding this.There is information regarding cloud computing for businesses! Businesses, who wish to get on the “flight to the clouds” like their peers to keep their heads above the “cloud” and competition. With cloud service providers, businesses can tap into the IT services that they need, when they need, for as long as they need; without investing in any IT infrastructure. The result is a far more agile and cost-effective IT services and this paper looks at how and why.After looking at the good of cloud computing, the bad, and the ugly is revealed. Not all our experiences on the Internet have been totally positive. A range of security and trust issues exist. Individuals and businesses ask is “how secured are their information once it is with the cloud service providers?” There is analysis on the ownership of data and information stored with the cloud service providers and taxonomy of data that you post on social networking web sites.Finally, anecdotes about cloud computing that support our endeavour to compute in the cloud. Cloud computing is not a hype, it is a reality. Cloud computing is not a fad, it is here to stay. The question is no longer “will cloud computing happen?” but “how you are going to exploit this technology?”Keywordscloud computingvirtual computingcluster computingdistributed computingpervasive computing

Cloud computing provides computing resources like software and hardware as a service by the network for several users. Task scheduling is one of the main problems to attain cost-effective execution. The main purpose of task scheduling is to allocate tasks to resources so that it can optimize one or more criteria. Since the problem of task scheduling is one of the Nondeterministic Polynomial-time (NP)-hard problems, meta-heuristic algorithms have been widely employed for solving task scheduling problems. One of the new bio-inspired meta-algorithms is Seagull Optimization Algorithm (SOA). In this paper, we proposed an energy-aware and cost-efficient SOA-based Task Scheduling (SOATS) algorithm. The aims of proposed algorithm to make a trade-off between five objectives (i.e., energy consumption, makespan, cost, waiting time, and load balancing) using a fewer number of iterations. The experiment results by comparing with several meta-heuristic algorithms (i.e., Genetic Algorithm (GA), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), and Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA)) prove that the proposed technique performs better in solving task scheduling problem. Moreover, we compared the proposed algorithm with well-known scheduling methods: Cost-based Job Scheduling (CJS), Moth Search Algorithm based Differential Evolution (MSDE), and Fuzzy-GA (FUGE). In the heavily loaded environment, the SOATS algorithm improved energy consumption and cost saving by 10 and 25%, respectively.

Cloud computing has emerged as a new computing paradigm, with provisioning model generally consisting of cloud service providers (CSPs), network service providers (NSPs), and end users. The associated economics has opened up a new research area; and with the expansion of the cloud computing market, the relationship between CSPs and NSPs, is changing profoundly. In addition to providing the default network services, traditional NSPs, in attempt to compete with CSPs, have started offering cloud services to end users. Though much progress has been made toward addressing competitions among CSPs themselves or among NSPs themselves, few studies have focused on the competition between CSPs and NSPs. In this paper, we investigate the problem of insufficient studies on the competition between CSPs and NSPs by presenting a new economic model to characterize the competition between CSPs and NSPs, and by conducting thorough theoretical analysis as well as numeric experiments to validate the proposed model. We believe, based on results, that the proposed economic model is general and feasible, and thus is applicable to modeling the competition among service providers in cloud computing market.

Cloud computing is currently the most hyped and popular paradigm in the domain of distributed computing. Multiple vendors are providing infrastructure, platform, and software-related cloud products or solutions, and the number of such vendors is growing rapidly. But the reality is that there is very little in the form of standards in general and interoperability standards in particular. This leads to a challenging situation for cloud service consumers as they need to use solutions provided by multiple cloud vendors in order to fulfill their business requirements, and the lack of standardization leads to lack of interoperability among the solutions provided by varied vendors. Service brokers act as intermediaries between the cloud service providers and consumers. The role of service brokers becomes critical in situations that need integration among multiple systems as they bridge the interoperability gaps among multiple cloud solutions and thus compensate for the lack of standards. They do so by acting as agents adding value on behalf of the service consumers. The usage of such cloud brokers also helps to future-proof the solution as service brokers add a layer of indirection, thus enabling loose coupling among the cloud service consumers and providers. The aim of this chapter is to review the role of cloud service brokers in cloud computing. The review includes consolidation of the definitions and characteristics of cloud service brokers, review of the current brokerage solutions, and interfacing requirements. Also presented are a high-level cloud service broker functional architecture, criteria for selection of a cloud service broker, future trends and review of benefits, and challenges of using cloud service brokers.

Dynamics of service selection and provider pricing game in heterogeneous cloud market

Cloud computing has fundamentally transformed information storage and enterprise operations, yet this technological shift has exposed critical vulnerabilities in trade secret protection. Corporate data once confined to internal networks now spans global cloud infrastructures, making Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) essential intermediaries in safeguarding proprietary knowledge. The central research problem examined in this study is whether, and to what extent, CSPs can be held legally accountable when third-party actors misappropriate trade secrets by exploiting security gaps, contractual disclaimers, and fragmented regulatory standards. The primary objective of this research is to critically analyze the liability regime applicable to CSPs in cases of third-party trade secret misappropriation, identifying doctrinal and practical gaps within statutory frameworks, judicial reasoning, and contractual protections. The study employs a comparative doctrinal legal research methodology, examining statutory provisions, case law, and authoritative secondary literature across three key jurisdictions: India, the United States, and the European Union. The research reveals that India's reliance on contractual shields and fragmented statutory mechanisms fails to delineate clear CSP responsibilities, particularly where breaches stem from multi-tenant misconfigurations or supply-chain vulnerabilities. In contrast, the United States provides consolidated remedies through the Defend Trade Secrets Act, while the European Union operates a layered framework integrating trade secret law with mandatory cybersecurity duties under GDPR Article 32 and the NIS2 Directive. Across all jurisdictions, evidentiary challenges in establishing "reasonable security," causation, and attribution significantly complicate accountability determinations. The study concludes that targeted reforms are essential to address these deficiencies. Key recommendations include enacting a model Indian trade secrets statute incorporating explicit cloud-security benchmarks, implementing legally mandated contractual clauses ensuring audit rights and incident reporting, establishing calibrated safe harbors for CSPs tied to demonstrable security controls, and developing international frameworks to facilitate cross-border evidence recovery. These measures aim to balance innovation with robust trade secret protection in an era where cloud architecture has become indispensable to economic life. Keywords: Cloud computing, Cloud Service Providers, Contractual liability, Cybersecurity, Intermediary liability, Regulatory fragmentation, Trade secrets

Copyright: © 2013 Deka GC. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. As governments around the world continue to grapple with slow-moving economies, cloud computing is emerging as a viable and valuable answer to the persistent demands for reducing public sector spending. Recent attention has shifted to a new initiative called Cloud Government (G-Cloud) incorporating cloud computing into e-Government services, particularly aimed at communicating directly with citizens and implementing cloud computing services in order to cut costs and improve upon the IT services infrastructure. G-Cloud is an Internet based communications which enable public bodies to host, select and use computing services from secure, resilient and cost-effective IT service environment. The ambition of the journey from traditional IT infrastructures towards cloud computing and IaaS is a trusted Cloud with the network as the logical platform to bring the existing assets in the Datacenter and new Cloud computing approaches with Virtualization, Governance, Security, Information and Application. The G-Cloud program’s core benefits are cost reduction, improved services, faster delivery and progressive sustainability agenda. The citizen-centric data, services and applications will be stored, maintained and delivered from G-Cloud and a comprehensive government portal will be a part and parcel of this cloud-based service delivery. Government applications store will provide a “portal” to purchase G-Cloud services. The latest trend on G-Cloud is following the agency-by-agency implementation scenario. Various Ministries/Departments may use cloud services provided by various Cloud Service Provider (CSP) based on the availability in a particular locality as well as the specific requirement of the particular Department/Ministry. It is a fact that all the CSPs are not equally competent in all types of services like accounting, ERP, CRM etc. But for the smooth function of the Government machinery these clouds must be interoperable. Current cloud frameworks are not designed to interact with each other, which make it more difficult for organizations to consolidate their applications and fully realize the savings and productivity benefits of cloud solutions. The dynamic location of service facilities, Virtualization of hardware and software elements is stressing the communication network & protocols, when datacenters are interconnected through the Internet. Although the “Computing” aspects of Cloud have been largely investigated, lower attention has been devoted to the “Networking of Clouds”.

Cloud computing is the present technology which is gaining greater attentions. Nowadays, among all the technologies that includes the network security, data protections, virtualization security, application integrity and identity management, the cloud is the most essential and key aspect. Among all the above mentioned issues, data protection is one of the most important security element because organizations cannot transfer their data to the remote machines as there is no guarantee of data protection by the cloud service providers. Many techniques are already available to protect the data in cloud. Though there are many number of techniques implemented to have focus on security of data but still some challenges persist. Cloud computing solves not only the computing problems but also caters loads of data with software updates etc. The user will be confident in utilising the cloud sources only if there is an appropriate collaboration between cloud client and cloud service provider. The most popular security techniques include SSL (Secure Socket Layer) Encryption, Algorithms like AES, Blowfish, DES, RSA, Cloud Computing, and Data Security. This paper mainly focus on how to analyse and evaluate the most important security encryption algorithms for data protection in cloud computing. Furthermore, this paper also discusses about some of the new security techniques for data protection which will be recommended in order to have improved security in cloud computing. Keywords: Cloud, Data Protection, Security, Asymmetric Algorithms, Symmetric Algorithm.

As the field of information technology expands, there is a huge need for cloud service providers (CSP). CSP’s vast solutions and services support Cloud, IoT, Fog, and Edge computing. In today’s competitive cloud market, customer satisfaction is critical more than ever. CSP and consumer satisfaction with service level agreement (SLA) fulfillment have always been given more attention. As a result of signing SLA and CSP agreements to supply resources in high demand, customers are now experiencing issues with resource delivery. Cloud and heterogeneous environments necessitate an intelligent recommender and negotiation agent model (IRNAM) to handle responsibilities in the current system. The Recommender system recommends CSP as per users’ priorities, which eases the filtration process. The negotiation process provided by IRNAM ensures that users’ choices are prioritized with maximum jobs to CSP. IRNAM keeps track of the most critical metrics and can reach decisions quickly and for the best possible deal. It uses an analytical concession algorithm that analyzes consumer and CSP choices to find a reliable, secure server with the simplest solution. The negotiation process uses user’s and CSP choice metrics, performance factors, evaluation measures, and success factors in the best execution time to decide. IRNAM provides a flexible and valuable way for selecting CSP and negotiating for services on the user’s terms while considering CSP satisfaction.

Cloud computing is the next phase in the Internet's evolution, providing the means through which computing power, computing infrastructure, applications, business processes can be delivered to businesses and individual as a service wherever and whenever they need. Businesses who use cloud service providers (CSP) tend to have service level agreements (SLA) that act as contract and define the level of expected service from the CSP, including availability, performance and security. Recent research suggests the use of third party auditors (TPA) as a mean to monitor CSPs. This paper shows how CSP may deceit the SLA to reduce their cost and become more competitive, while avoiding detection by TPAs. The paper presents a crowdsourced TPA model to monitor the CSPs and consequently detect any deception.

In Cloud computing, resources such as CPU, RAM, and disk etc. are provided as a service via the Internet. Elasticity is a key feature of Cloud Computing. It aims to enabling a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) to negotiate the possibility to borrow external resources from other CSPs when its own facilities are not able to satisfy a client request. Reciprocally, a CSP may sell some of its unused resources to another CSP in case of under load. Today, Cloud Brokering and Cloud Federation are the two approaches considered for Cloud elasticity. In the context of the Easi-Clouds European ITEA 2 research project, we aim to develop Pricing-as-a-Service (PraaS) suited to Federated Cloud environment. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we provide a state of the art of pricing in multi-cloud environment. We discuss specifications of Cloud Brokering and Cloud Federation. Three types of pricing strategies (on-demand, spot and reserved) are presented with different existing resource pricing models. In the second part we propose different pricing policies suited to the Federated environment with numerical analysis via simulation. Finally, results are provided showing the best pricing policy suited for federation cloud as well as the spot influence on a federated environment. Results are evaluated in term of CSPs revenues and the number of rejected sessions.

Cloud computing is a mode of acquisition of infrastructure where a cloud service provides on demand computing and on-demand storage, accessible over the web, with a matching business model, namely pay-per-use. Lower cost, sometimes a factor of five, is achieved by automating operations in warehouse-sized data centres, sharing the hefty burden of cooling, physical security, and power backup, and the use of commodity components. As access to storage managed by cloud service providers gained market acceptance, the phrase ?the cloud? came into use to refer to the location of information stored with a cloud service provider to be shared (business documents and photos) or copied for backup (against losing a phone or deleting information on a laptop). Security, and to a lesser extent privacy, concerns are the major barriers to the adoption of cloud computing, but the leading cloud service providers have responded to the point that sensitive information, such as medical records and credit-card-holder data, is now held in the cloud.

Online service is used to be as Pay-Per-Use in Cloud computing. Service user need not be in a long time contract with cloud service providers. Service level agreements (SLAs) are understandings marked between a cloud service providers and others, for example, a service user, intermediary operator, or observing operators. Since cloud computing is an ongoing technology giving numerous services to basic business applications and adaptable systems to manage online agreements are significant. SLA maintains the quality-of-service to the cloud user. If service provider fails to maintain the required service SLA is considered to be SLA violated. The main aim is to minimize the SLA violations for maintain the QoS of their cloud users. In this research article, a toolbox is proposed to help the procedure of exchanging of a SLA with the service providers that will enable the cloud client in indicating service quality demands and an algorithm as well as Negotiation model is also proposed to negotiate the request with the service providers to produce a better agreement between service provider and cloud service consumer. Subsequently, the discussed framework can reduce SLA violations as well as negotiation disappointments and have expanded cost-adequacy. Moreover, the suggested SLA toolkit is additionally productive to clients so clients can secure a sensible value repayment for diminished QoS or conceding time. This research shows the assurance level in the cloud service providers can be kept up by as yet conveying the services with no interruption from the client's perspective

In the current technological era, the use of computers becomes an essential part of our life. The Internet has been become as mandatory in the human-being life. The cloud computing has the potential to transform the current static Internet into a fully integrated future Internet. It is a style of computing in which resources are provided “as a service” to users who need not have knowledge or expertise and or control over the infrastructure. The cloud computing technology has become a popular and necessary in the present decade. The cloud computing is the way of sharing resources for the use of various resources via the internet. Hence there are many cloud service providers are competing with each other in order to provide cloud services to the cloud users. In fact, the growth of cloud users has been increased tremendously from last decade to the present decade. In directives to provide right cloud service to users is aimed at almost all cloud service providers. The cloud service providers are also increasing many features of their cloud service products to attract the cloud service users. But cloud service users are facing difficulties to select the right service from a pool of cloud services. Hence it has become necessary for cloud service users to evaluate cloud services and select the best one, for this purpose a new evaluation model has been proposed in this paper based on data mining Fuzzy clustering algorithm.