Cloud Computing

Southern University at New Orleans
College of Business and Public Administration
Department of Management Information System

CISP 685-01
Information Security Foundation
Instructor: G.S. Alijani

By
Manisha Biyyam
Spring 2015

Cloud Computing

Definition:
The expression cloud itself means something dim, fogy, dark, foul, or indistinctly characterized. As it were, it needs to do with virtualization and reflection of computing services and assets. Hence, cloud computing could be characterized as a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or administration supplier association. It is the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, supervise, and develop data, instead of local server or a personal computer. This cloud model advances availability and is composed of five essential characteristics: on demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling (location independence), rapid elasticity, and measured service; it also has the three service models, and four deployment models.
Objective:
The CTO of Amazon, Mr. Werner Vogels identified the core objectives of cloud computing are based on the principles that cloud computing must attain in order to be successful. It includes security, scalability, availability, performance, cost-effective, acquire resources on demand, release resources when no longer needed, pay for what you use (utility computing), leverage others’ core competencies, and turn fixed cost into variable cost. Security and the availability of the assets or the services are very necessary, because the core of virtualization is to safeguard that the services are available when needed.
Standards:
The standards mission of cloud is to provide the industry and the government for the formation and management of appropriate cloud computing standards allowing all parties to gain the maximum value from cloud computing. In favor of cloud, NIST wants to promote standards: propose roadmaps for the needed standards, acting as catalysts to help industry formulate their own standards opportunities for the services, software, and hardware providers, promoting government and industry adoption of cloud standards. The objective of this exertion is to guarantee a fungible cloud and advance quality service through the cloud offerings. Regularly, these models are arranged into: core features standardized core cloud capabilities and advanced features proprietary value-add functionality. However, the right blend or determination of the core and exclusive peculiarities gives an organization a desired result. The standards could incorporate persistent storage like the Azure, S3, EBS and many more, supported programming languages, formats for data export and import example XML schemas and so on.
Roadmap for models and services: There are three cloud service models:
1. Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS)—the capability given to the consumer is to use the provider’s applications running on a cloud infrastructure and reachable from different client devices through a thin client interface such as a Web browser example web-based email. The customer does not manage or control the fundamental cloud infrastructure, network, servers, operating systems, storage, or even individual application capabilities, with the possible exception of limited user-specific application configuration settings. (Mell & Grance, 2009)
2. Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) — the capability given to the customer is to deploy onto the cloud infrastructure customer-created applications using programming languages and tools supported by the provider example java, python, .Net. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure, network, servers, operating systems, or