Abstract-One of the main obstacles hindering wider adoption of storage cloud services is vendor lock-in, a situation in which large amounts of data that are placed in one storage system can not be migrated to another vendor, e.g., due to time and cost considerations. To prevent this situation we present an advanced on-boarding federation mechanism, enabling a cloud to add a special federation layer to efficiently import data from other storage clouds. This is achieved without being dependent on any special function from the other clouds.We design a generic, modular on-boarding architecture and demonstrate its implementation as part of a VISION Cloud, which is a large scale storage cloud designed for content-centric data. Our system is capable of integrating storage data from various clouds, providing a common global view of storage data. The users can access the data through the new cloud provider immediately after the setup, maintaining the normal operation of applications, so that they do not need to wait for the completion of the data migration process. Finally, we analyze the payment models of existing storage clouds, showing that transferring the data via on-boarding federation with a direct link between clouds can lead to significant time and cost savings.

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Current research on cardiovascular prevention predominantly focuses on risk-stratification and management of patients with coronary artery disease (CAD) to optimize their prognosis. Several basic, translational and clinical research efforts aim to determine the etiological mechanisms underlying CAD pathogenesis and to identify lifestyle-dependent metabolic risk factors or genetic and epigenetic parameters responsible for CAD occurrence and/or progression. A log-linear association between the absolute exposure of LDL cholesterol (LDL-C) and the risk of atherosclerotic cardio-vascular disease (ASCVD) was well documented over the year. LDL-C was identified as the principal enemy to fight against, and soluble proprotein convertase subtilisin kexin type 9 (PCSK9) was attributed the role of a powerful regulator of blood LDL-C levels. The two currently available antibodies (alirocumab and evolocumab) against PCSK9 are fully human engineered IgG that bind to soluble PCSK9 and avoid its interaction with the LDLR. As documented by modern and dedicated “game-changer” trials, antibodies against soluble PCSK9 reduce LDL-C levels by at least 60 percent when used alone and up to 85 percent when used in combination with high-intensity statins and/or other hypolipidemic therapies, including ezetimibe. Their clinical indications are well established, but new areas of use are advocated. Several clues suggest that regulation of PCSK9 represents a cornerstone of cardiovascular prevention, partly because of some pleiotropic effects attributed to these newly developed drugs. New mechanisms of PCSK9 regulation are being explored, and further efforts need to be put in place to reach patients with these new therapies. The aim of this manuscript is to perform a narrative review of the literature on soluble PCSK9 inhibitor drugs, with a focus on their indications and clinical impact.

Abstract. As the volume of digital data rapidly increases, storage clouds are becoming a popular solution for both enterprise and personal data, and the number of storage cloud solutions is also increasing. However, these solutions do not yet deal with the need of customers for interoperability and data migration from one cloud to another. These issues can be addressed through federation of cloud infrastructures. An important aspect of federation is delegation of access control, where one actor, e.g., an end user, authorizes another actor, e.g., a cloud provider, to act on its behalf, typically with a subset of its access rights, safely and securely.This paper deals with delegation across storage clouds. We describe a delegation architecture for on-boarding federation, which allows an enterprise to efficiently migrate its data from one storage cloud provider to another (e.g., for business or legal reasons), while providing continuous access and a unified view over the data during the migration. In our architecture a user delegates a subset of his access rights on the source and destination clouds to an on-boarding federation layer on the destination cloud. This enables on-boarding to occur in a safe and secure way, such that the on-boarding layer has the least privilege required to carry out its work. We evaluate the security implications of delegation that need to be taken into account for on-boarding. We also show how the delegation architecture can be implemented using the Security Assertion Markup Language.

Cloud storage systems provide highly scalable and continuously available storage services to millions of geographically distributed clients. In order for users to trust their data to these systems, they need to be confident that their data is secure. Thus, cloud services should implement an access control mechanism preventing unauthorized access and manipulation of their data. This chapter presents the existing access control mechanisms and describes their advantages and limitations in the Cloud set-up. The authors address the main access control aspects that include managing the identities and defining access policies. Furthermore, they describe more complex scenarios of identity federation and integration of separate identity silos which is required in various scenarios, like collaboration, merge on acquisition, or migration. For each topic, the authors present the existing solutions and describe the motivation for the architecture developed by the VISION Cloud project.