Query: what is cloud computing?

title: What Is Cloud Computing
abstract: Cloud computing is the practice where computing services such as storage options, processing units, and networking capabilities are exposed for consumption by users over the Internet (the cloud) These services range from free to pay as you use billing.

title: What Is Cloud Computing?
abstract: Cloud computing is a distributed environment for multiple organizations to use remotely and get high scalability, reliability on anytime, anywhere, and pay as you go concepts. An organization has to create data centres to store, manage, and process the information to achieve benefits from data and make decisions. Cloud gives organizations a successful approach that leads to profit without maintaining the cost of data centres and technical staff to manage the services. Cloud has different types of architectures, types of clouds, and cost packages for using the cloud. These services can be scaled up or down when required by an organization. Cloud has unbeatable future because IT world is acquiring it and giving a boost to their businesses. Many cloud providers are using it and the remaining are moving to cloud. Cloud computing also gives birth to edge computing, fog computing, and many more zero downtime solutions.

title: Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing
abstract: Cloud Computing, the long held dream of computing as a utility, has the potential to transform a large part of the IT industry, making software even more attractive as a service and shaping the way IT hardware is designed and purchased. Developers with innovative ideas for new Internet services no longer require the large capital outlays in hardware to deploy their service or the human expense to operate it. They need not be concerned about overprovisioning for a service whose popularity does not meet their predictions, thus wasting costly resources, or underprovisioning for one that becomes wildly popular, thus missing potential customers and revenue. Moreover, companies with large batch oriented tasks can get results as quickly as their programs can scale, since using 1000 servers for one hour costs no more than using one server for 1000 hours. This elasticity of resources, without paying a premium for large scale, is unprecedented in the history of IT. Cloud Computing refers to both the applications delivered as services over the Internet and the hardware and systems software in the datacenters that provide those services. The services themselves have long been referred to as Software as a Service (SaaS) The datacenter hardware and software is what we will call a Cloud. When a Cloud is made available in a pay as you go manner to the general public, we call it a Public Cloud; the service being sold is Utility Computing. We use the term Private Cloud to refer to internal datacenters of a business or other organization, not made available to the general public. Thus, Cloud Computing is the sum of SaaS and Utility Computing, but does not include Private Clouds. People can be users or providers of SaaS, or users or providers of Utility Computing. We focus on SaaS Providers (Cloud Users) and Cloud Providers, which have received less attention than SaaS Users. From a hardware point of view, three aspects are new in Cloud Computing.

title: What is Cloud Computing
abstract: Roland Barrera is a Cloud Technical Trainer at Rackspace and one of the original members of the Rackspace Cloud Support Team. Roland will discuss " as well as give an introduction into Rackspace's robust Cloud Product Portfolio. Spring 2013

title: The impact of the hybrid platform of internet of things and cloud computing on healthcare systems: opportunities, challenges, and open problems
abstract: Cloud Computing (CC) and the Internet of Things (IoT) have emerged as new platforms in the ICT revolution of the twenty first century. The adoption of the CloudIoT paradigm in the healthcare field can bring several opportunities to medical IT, and experts believe that it can significantly improve healthcare services and contribute to its continuous and systematic innovation. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the current literature on integration of CC and IoT to solving various problems in healthcare applications such as smart hospitals, medicine control, and remote medical services. Also, a brief introduction to cloud computing and internet of things with an application to health care is given. This paper presents a new concept of the integration of CC and IoT for healthcare applications, which is what we; call the CloudIoT Health paradigm. The term CloudIoT Health and some key integration issues are presented in this paper to offer a practical vision to integrate current components of CC and the IoT in healthcare applications. Also, this paper aims to present the state of the art and gap analysis of different levels of integration components, analyzing different existing proposals in CloudIoT Health systems. Finally, related researches of CC and IoT integration for healthcare systems have been reviewed. Challenges to be addressed and future directions of research are identified, and an extensive bibliography is presented.

title: Integration of Cloud computing and Internet of Things: A survey
abstract: Cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) are two very different technologies that are both already part of our life. Their adoption and use are expected to be more and more pervasive, making them important components of the Future Internet. A novel paradigm where Cloud and IoT are merged together is foreseen as disruptive and as an enabler of a large number of application scenarios.In this paper, we focus our attention on the integration of Cloud and IoT, which is what we call the CloudIoT paradigm. Many works in literature have surveyed Cloud and IoT separately and, more precisely, their main properties, features, underlying technologies, and open issues. However, to the best of our knowledge, these works lack a detailed analysis of the new CloudIoT paradigm, which involves completely new applications, challenges, and research issues. To bridge this gap, in this paper we provide a literature survey on the integration of Cloud and IoT. Starting by analyzing the basics of both IoT and Cloud Computing, we discuss their complementarity, detailing what is currently driving to their integration. Thanks to the adoption of the CloudIoT paradigm a number of applications are gaining momentum: we provide an up to date picture of CloudIoT applications in literature, with a focus on their specific research challenges. These challenges are then analyzed in details to show where the main body of research is currently heading. We also discuss what is already available in terms of platforms both proprietary and open source and projects implementing the CloudIoT paradigm. Finally, we identify open issues and future directions in this field, which we expect to play a leading role in the landscape of the Future Internet. Vision and motivations for the integration of Cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT).Applications stemming from the integration of Cloud computing and IoT.Hot research topics and challenges in the integrated scenario of Cloud computing and IoT.Open issues and future directions for research in this scenario.

title: II What is Cloud Computing
abstract: Cloud computing brings together several existing technologies including service oriented architecture, distributed grid computing, virtualization, and broadband networking to provide software, infrastructure, and platforms as services. Under the old IT model, companies built their own server farms designed to meet peak demand using bundled hardware and software solutions. This was time consuming, capital intensive and relatively inflexible. Under the cloud computing model, firms can rent as many virtual machines as they need at any given time, and then either design or use off the shelf solutions to integrate company wide data in order to easily distribute access to users both within and outside of the company firewall. This converts fixed capital costs into variable costs, prevents under and over provisioning, and allows minute by minute flexibly. Consumers are also increasingly turning to the cloud for computing service through such applications as Gmail, Pandora, and Facebook. The purpose of this paper is to discuss this new and transformative technology, survey the existing economics literature on the subject, and suggest potential directions for new research.

title: Cyber Storms Come from Clouds: Security of Cloud Computing in the IoT Era
abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly changing our society to a world where every "thing" is connected to the Internet, making computing pervasive like never before. This tsunami of connectivity and data collection relies more and more on the Cloud, where data analytics and intelligence actually reside. Cloud computing has indeed revolutionized the way computational resources and services can be used and accessed, implementing the concept of utility computing whose advantages are undeniable for every business. However, despite the benefits in terms of flexibility, economic savings, and support of new services, its widespread adoption is hindered by the security issues arising with its usage. From a security perspective, the technological revolution introduced by IoT and Cloud computing can represent a disaster, as each object might become inherently remotely hackable and, as a consequence, controllable by malicious actors. While the literature mostly focuses on the security of IoT and Cloud computing as separate entities, in this article we provide an up to date and well structured survey of the security issues of cloud computing in the IoT era. We give a clear picture of where security issues occur and what their potential impact is. As a result, we claim that it is not enough to secure IoT devices, as cyber storms come from Clouds.

title: The cloud computing adoption in higher learning institutions in Kenya: Hindering factors and recommendations for the way forward
abstract: Cloud computing technology has revolutionized the delivery of computing services to the consumers as customized services on demand making them cost effective and resource efficient. However, various challenges hinder the adoption of this technology, especially in educational institutions. This paper explores the factors that information technology (IT) leaders consider to be impeding the adoption of cloud computing in institutions of higher learning in Kenya. A quantitative investigation using an online questionnaire was used to conduct this study in the 69 accredited universities and colleges in Kenya. The study findings were statistically analyzed to rank the level of influence of the factors that under investigation. The key factors identified as hindering the adoption of cloud computing include concerns about the reliability of Cloud Service providers and lack of skills in cloud computing. Also, there are concerns about inadequate support and training from Cloud Service providers and government policies on cloud computing, data security and confidentiality. Role based training for Cloud services users, proactive management of Cloud services and implementation of information systems governance policies are recommended to address these concerns. These recommendations have been discussed and consolidated into a framework for adoption of cloud computing that can also be applied by educational institutions in other developing countries to assist the key stakeholders in guiding their decision making process on adoption of cloud computing. Although the study is limited to accredited universities and colleges in Kenya, it comes at a convenient time when the Kenyan government is launching e learning in all public primary schools. There is however not much research that had been done especially on cloud computing in Kenyan educational institutions. This study, therefore, adds new insights on what needs to be considered and addressed to facilitate the adoption of cloud computing in institutions of higher education.

title: Blockchain based efficient and robust fair payment for outsourcing services in cloud computing
abstract: As an attractive business model of cloud computing, outsourcing services usually involve online payment and security issues. The mutual distrust between users and outsourcing service providers may severely impede the wide adoption of cloud computing. Nevertheless, most existing payment solutions only consider a specific type of outsourcing service and rely on a trusted third party to realize fairness. In this paper, in order to realize secure and fair payment of outsourcing services in general without relying on any third party, trusted or not, we introduce BCPay, a blockchain based fair payment framework for outsourcing services in cloud computing. We first present the system architecture, specifications and adversary model of BCPay, then describe in detail its design. Our security analysis indicates that BCPay achieves Soundness and what we call Robust Fairness, where the fairness is resilient to eavesdropping and malleability attacks. Furthermore, our performance evaluation shows that BCPay is very efficient in terms of the number of transactions and computation cost. As illustrative applications of BCPay, we further construct a blockchain based provable data possession scheme in cloud computing and a blockchain based outsourcing computation protocol in fog computing.