Light-Weighted Decision Support Framework for Selecting Cloud Service Providers

Multi-criteria decision making(MCDM)is a technique used to achieve better outcomes for some complex business-related problems,whereby the selection of the best alternative can be made in as many cases as possible.This paper proposes a model,the multi-criteria decision support method,that allows both service providers and consumers to maximize their profits while preserving the best matching process for resource allocation and task scheduling.The increasing number of service providers with different service provision capabilities creates an issue for consumers seeking to select the best service provider.Each consumer seeks a service provider based on various preferences,such as price,service quality,and time to complete the tasks.In the literature,the problem is viewed from different perspectives,such as investigating how to enhance task scheduling and the resource allocation process,improve consumers’trust,and deal with network problems.This paper offers a novel model that considers the preferences of both service providers and consumers to find the best available service provider for each consumer.First,the model adopts the best-worst method(BWM)to gather and prioritize tasks based on consumers’and service providers’preferences.Then,the model calculates and matches similarities between the sets of tasks from the consumer’s side with the sets of tasks from the provider’s side to select the best service provider for each consumer using the two proposed algorithms.The complexity of the two algorithms is found to be O(n3).

Cloud-Based Software Development Lifecycle:A Simplified Algorithm for Cloud Service Provider Evaluation with Metric Analysis

At present,hundreds of cloud vendors in the global market provide various services based on a customer’s requirements.All cloud vendors are not the same in terms of the number of services,infrastructure availability,security strategies,cost per customer,and reputation in the market.Thus,software developers and organizations face a dilemma when choosing a suitable cloud vendor for their developmental activities.Thus,there is a need to evaluate various cloud service providers(CSPs)and platforms before choosing a suitable vendor.Already existing solutions are either based on simulation tools as per the requirements or evaluated concerning the quality of service attributes.However,they require more time to collect data,simulate and evaluate the vendor.The proposed work compares various CSPs in terms of major metrics,such as establishment,services,infrastructure,tools,pricing models,market share,etc.,based on the comparison,parameter ranking,and weightage allocated.Furthermore,the parameters are categorized depending on the priority level.The weighted average is calculated for each CSP,after which the values are sorted in descending order.The experimental results show the unbiased selection of CSPs based on the chosen parameters.The proposed parameter-ranking priority level weightage(PRPLW)algorithm simplifies the selection of the best-suited cloud vendor in accordance with the requirements of software development.

Reducing Video Transmission Cost of the Cloud Service Provider with QoS-Guaranteed

With the advancement of cloud computing technology,many service providers are combining with cloud service providers to build a highly available streaming video-on-demand cloud platform and provide video services to end users.Generally,cloud service providers deploy many edge cloud CDN nodes in different geographic areas and provide video services to end users.However,when an end-user wants to watch certain videos and request video resources from surrounding edge cloud CDN nodes,the edge cloud CDN node will request missing video clips from other cloud nodes.Therefore,this will generate a large amount of additional video transmission costs and reduce the quality of service of the cloud service provider.To reduce or even minimize the video transmission cost of edge cloud CDN nodes while ensuring the quality of service(QoS).We designed a video transmission algorithm called Netdmc to ensure transmission quality.The algorithm can be divided into two parts.The first part is a low-latency video request algorithm based on ensuring service quality,and the second part is a video request algorithm based on minimizing video transmission costs.The simulation results demonstrate that the Netdmc algorithm can effectively reduce the cost of cloud service providers and ensure the quality of video services.

An Integrated Framework for Cloud Service Selection Based on BOM and TOPSIS

Many businesses have experienced difficulties in selecting a cloud service provider(CSP)due to the rapid advancement of cloud computing services and the proliferation of CSPs.Many independent criteria should be considered when evaluating the services provided by different CSPs.It is a case of multi-criteria decision-making(MCDM).This paper presents an integrated MCDM cloud service selection framework for determining the most appropriate service provider based on the best only method(BOM)and technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution(TOPSIS).To obtain the weights of criteria and the relative importance of CSPs based on each criterion,BOM performs pairwise comparisons of criteria and also for alternatives on each criterion,and TOPSIS uses these weights to rank cloud alternatives.An evaluation and validation of the proposed framework have been carried out through a use-case model to prove its efficiency and accuracy.Moreover,the developed framework was compared with the analytical hierarchical process(AHP),a popular MCDM approach,based on two perspectives:efficiency and consistency.According to the research results,the proposed framework only requires 25%of the comparisons needed for the AHP approach.Furthermore,the proposed framework has a CR of 0%,whereas AHP has 38%.Thus,the proposed framework performs better than AHPwhen it comes to computation complexity and consistency,implying that it is more efficient and trustworthy.

Cloud Services Quality Enhancement through Control &Monitoring of Service Level Agreements at Server and Consumer Side

Several researches and case studies have been revealing a repetitive issue and that is monopolization of controlling, measuring, and metering of the consumer’s billing for the consumed Cloud Services. The Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) have been hiding, or monopolizing the controlling, metering tools and ignoring the calculation and consideration of the service defects like downtime, service outage, poor performance and client service migration delays during overloads of the servers. The main issues behind these discrepancies are the Service Level Agreement (SLA), its violation, and the monopolized Cloud Governance. Till now there is a lack of parallel monitoring and metering system of the consumed cloud services at the customer level under the provisions of SLAs. The Cloud Governance Tier has not given any flexibility or utility to monitor such consumed cloud services at the client tier in parallel to the CSP tier. This research is an effort to develop a SLA controlling/monitoring framework to solve the identified problems other than the CSP level. Further the E_Draw max was used for designing the framework. The framework consists of the components like;SLA_CSP, SLA_CSC, SLA_M&C and Cloud Services and Delivery Models. After designing the framework, a prototype was developed using CloudSim on java net beans, and MySQL database. This prototype was implemented using four scenarios to evaluate its performance and the functionalities. 1) Checking the SLA under CSP whether the resources to the consumer in the same manner with promised. 2) To check if the request from cloud consumer is less than what is expected in SLA. 3) To check by increasing the request of cloud consumer more than what is expected in SLA and 4) Using the SLA_M&C mechanism. After execution it was observed that, in the first and the second cases there is no violation, but there is violation in the third and fourth cases. This implied that there are chances of the discrepancies in resources provided to make the selves beneficiary beyond SLA under CSP and CSC was discriminated while receiving services from CSP.

Towards Developing Privacy-Preserved Data Security Approach(PP-DSA)in Cloud Computing Environment

In the present scenario of rapid growth in cloud computing models,several companies and users started to share their data on cloud servers.However,when the model is not completely trusted,the data owners face several security-related problems,such as user privacy breaches,data disclosure,data corruption,and so on,during the process of data outsourcing.For addressing and handling the security-related issues on Cloud,several models were proposed.With that concern,this paper develops a Privacy-Preserved Data Security Approach(PP-DSA)to provide the data security and data integrity for the out-sourcing data in Cloud Environment.Privacy preservation is ensured in this work with the Efficient Authentication Technique(EAT)using the Group Signature method that is applied with Third-Party Auditor(TPA).The role of the auditor is to secure the data and guarantee shared data integrity.Additionally,the Cloud Service Provider(CSP)and Data User(DU)can also be the attackers that are to be handled with the EAT.Here,the major objective of the work is to enhance cloud security and thereby,increase Quality of Service(QoS).The results are evaluated based on the model effectiveness,security,and reliability and show that the proposed model provides better results than existing works.

Prediction of Cloud Ranking in a Hyperconverged Cloud Ecosystem Using Machine Learning

Cloud computing is becoming popular technology due to its functional properties and variety of customer-oriented services over the Internet.The design of reliable and high-quality cloud applications requires a strong Quality of Service QoS parameter metric.In a hyperconverged cloud ecosystem environment,building high-reliability cloud applications is a challenging job.The selection of cloud services is based on the QoS parameters that play essential roles in optimizing and improving cloud rankings.The emergence of cloud computing is significantly reshaping the digital ecosystem,and the numerous services offered by cloud service providers are playing a vital role in this transformation.Hyperconverged software-based unified utilities combine storage virtualization,compute virtualization,and network virtualization.The availability of the latter has also raised the demand for QoS.Due to the diversity of services,the respective quality parameters are also in abundance and need a carefully designed mechanism to compare and identify the critical,common,and impactful parameters.It is also necessary to reconsider the market needs in terms of service requirements and the QoS provided by various CSPs.This research provides a machine learning-based mechanism to monitor the QoS in a hyperconverged environment with three core service parameters:service quality,downtime of servers,and outage of cloud services.

Enhanced Trust Based Access Control for Multi-Cloud Environment

Security is an essential part of the cloud environment.For ensuring the security of the data being communicated to and from the cloud server,a significant parameter called trust was introduced.Trust-based security played a vital role in ensuring that the communication between cloud users and service providers remained unadulterated and authentic.In most cloud-based data distribution environments,emphasis is placed on accepting trusted client users’requests,but the cloud servers’integrity is seldom verified.This paper designs a trust-based access control model based on user and server characteristics in a multi-cloud environment to address this issue.The proposed methodology consists of data encryption using Cyclic Shift Transposition Algorithm and trust-based access control method.In this trust-based access control mechanism framework,trust values are assigned to cloud users using direct trust degrees.The direct trust degree is estimated based on the following metrics:success and failure rate of interactions,service satisfaction index,and dishonesty level.In addition to this,trust values are assigned to cloud servers based on the metrics:server load,service rejection rate,and service access delay.The role-Based Access control policy of each user is modified based on his trust level.If the server fails to meet the minimum trust level,then another suitable server will be selected.The proposed system is found to outperform other existing systems in a multi-cloud environment.

Cloud Data Encryption and Authentication Based on Enhanced Merkle Hash Tree Method

Many organizations apply cloud computing to store and effectively process data for various applications.The user uploads the data in the cloud has less security due to the unreliable verification process of data integrity.In this research,an enhanced Merkle hash tree method of effective authentication model is proposed in the multi-owner cloud to increase the security of the cloud data.Merkle Hash tree applies the leaf nodes with a hash tag and the non-leaf node contains the table of hash information of child to encrypt the large data.Merkle Hash tree provides the efficient mapping of data and easily identifies the changesmade in the data due to proper structure.The developed model supports privacy-preserving public auditing to provide a secure cloud storage system.The data owners upload the data in the cloud and edit the data using the private key.An enhanced Merkle hash tree method stores the data in the cloud server and splits it into batches.The data files requested by the data owner are audit by a third-party auditor and the multiowner authentication method is applied during the modification process to authenticate the user.The result shows that the proposed method reduces the encryption and decryption time for cloud data storage by 2–167 ms when compared to the existing Advanced Encryption Standard and Blowfish.

Binary Multifold Encryption Technique for Complex Cloud Systems

Data security is a major cloud computing issue due to different usertransactions in the system. The evolution of cryptography and cryptographic analysis are regarded domains of current research. deoxyribo nucleic acid (DNA) cryptography makes use of DNA as a sensing platform, which is then manipulated usinga variety of molecular methods. Many security mechanisms including knowledgebased authentication, two-factor authentication, adaptive authentication, multifactorauthentication and single password authentication have been deployed. These cryptographic techniques have been developed to ensure confidentiality, but most ofthem are based on complex mathematical calculations and equations. In the proposed approach, a novel and unique Hybrid helix scuttle-deoxy ribo nucleic acids(HHS-DNA) encryption algorithm has been proposed which is inspired by DNAcryptography and Helix scuttle. The proposed HHS-DNA is a type of multifold binary version of DNA (MF-BDNA). The major role of this paper is to present a multifold HHS-DNA algorithm to encrypt the cloud data assuring more security with lesscomplexity. The experimentation is carried out and it reduces the encryption time,cipher text size, and improves throughput. When compared with previous techniques, there is a 45% improvement in throughput, 37% fast in encryption time,54.67% cipher text size. The relevant experimental results and foregoing analysisshow that this method is of good robustness, stability, and security.

Forensics Issues in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is an emerging technology that is being widely adopted throughout the world due to its ease-of-use. Organizations of all types can use it without pre-requisites such as IT infra-structure, technical skills, managerial overload, storage capacity, processing power, and data recovery or privacy setup. It can be availed by all clients as per their needs, expectations and budget. However, cloud computing introduces new kinds of security vulnerabilities that need to be ad-dressed. Traditional “Computer Forensics” deals with detection, preemption and prevention of IT triggered frauds and crimes but it lacks the ability to deal with cybercrimes pertaining to cloud computing environment. In this paper, we focus on forensics issues in cloud computing, assess limitations of forensic team and present the obstacles faced during investigation.