Cloud computing synopsis and recommendations

Abstract

The Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) promotes the U.S. economy and public welfare by providing technical leadership for the nation's measurement and standards infrastructure. ITL develops tests, test methods, reference data, proof of concept implementations, and technical analysis to advance the development and productive use of information technology. ITL's responsibilities include the development of management, administrative, technical, and physical standards and guidelines for the cost-effective security and privacy of other than national security-related information in Federal information systems. This Special Publication 800-series reports on ITL's research, guidance, and outreach efforts in computer security and its collaborative activities with industry, government, and academic organizations. Executive SummaryCloud computing allows computer users to conveniently rent access to fully featured applications, to software development and deployment environments, and to computing infrastructure assets such as network-accessible data storage and processing.This document reprises the NIST-established definition of cloud computing, describes cloud computing benefits and open issues, presents an overview of major classes of cloud technology, and provides guidelines and recommendations on how organizations should consider the relative opportunities and risks of cloud computing. Cloud computing has been the subject of a great deal of commentary. Attempts to describe cloud computing in general terms, however, have been problematic because cloud computing is not a single kind of system, but instead spans a spectrum of underlying technologies, configuration possibilities, service models, and deployment models. This document describes cloud systems and discusses their strengths and weaknesses.Depending on an organization's requirements, different technologies and configurations are appropriate. To understand which part of the spectrum of cloud systems is most appropriate for a given need, an organization should consider how clouds can be deployed (deployment models), what kinds of services can be provided to customers (service models), the economic opportunities and risks of using cloud services (economic considerations), the technical characteristics of cloud services such as performance and reliability (operational characteristics), typical terms of service (service level agreements), and the security opportunities and risks (security).Deployment Models. A cloud computing system may be deployed privately or hosted on the premises of a cloud customer, may be shared among a limited number of trusted partners, may be hosted by a third party, or may be a publically accessible service, i.e., a public cloud. Depending on the kind of cloud deployment, the cloud may have limited private computing resources, or may have access to large quantities of remotely accessed resources. The different deployment models present a number of tradeoffs in how customers can ...

Radar remote sensing from space for surface deformation analysis: present and future opportunities from the new SAR sensor generation

“…This characteristic forces to perform an optimization of existing algorithms; a possible choice is the implementation of algorithm portability to distributed hardware architectures (Lee et al 2011;Sadashiv and Kumar 2011). In this scenario, a key role can be played by the Cloud Computing technologies that are well established within the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) community (Badger et al 2012;Rosen et al 2012), but whose exploitation in the SAR and, particularly, DInSAR data processing field is still at an early stage . Indeed, by considering the already existing large SAR data archives and in view of the abovementioned huge data flow coming from the SENTINEL-1 constellation, it is clear that in-house facilities (even those based on grid architecture) can be a bottleneck due to their limited resources; this is particularly the case if the provisioning of multi-user services, allowing to process SAR data through advanced DInSAR methods and to access to the achieved results, is in order.…”

The challenges of data and services security in the cloud computing model

“…Zgodnie z nią (Badger, Grance, Patt-Corner, Voas, 2011): "cloud computing to model umożliwiający powszechny i wygodny dostęp na żądanie za pomocą sieci do współdzielonej puli konfigurowalnych zasobów teleinformatycznych (np. serwerów, pamięci masowych, aplikacji, platform, sieci) oraz ich szybkie pozyskanie i wydanie przy minimalnym wysiłku i interakcji z dostawcą modelu".…”

Data Governance Taxonomy: Cloud versus Non-Cloud

“…NIST's cloud computing reference architecture distinguishes five major actors: the cloud consumer, the cloud provider, the cloud auditor, the cloud carrier and the cloud broker [18]. Each cloud actor has special roles and responsibilities in any one cloud provision, so a data governance programme must clearly define the roles and responsibilities for all cloud actors [102]. Figure 14 shows the cloud actors in cloud data governance.…”