Introduction to Cloud Computing
1. Cloud computing is the paradigm of information technology, which enables universal access to all the shared pools of configurable system resources and the higher level services, which can be frequently provisioned with limited management effort, often over the Internet[1]. This cloud computing usually relies on the sharing of resources for the achievement of economy of scale and coherence, which is similar to any type of utility. The third party clouds usually enable all the organizations in focusing on the main businesses instead of wasting the resources on computer maintenance and infrastructure. Avoidance or minimization of the information technology infrastructure costs are done with the help of cloud computing[2]. It is much popular for the organizations or businesses and is easily acceptable by them. The supporters of cloud computing claim that it allows all the organizations or companies to improve the manageability of cloud. The three major types of cloud services are the Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service and Software as a Service.
Infrastructure as a service: IaaS is the specific type of cloud computing service, which provides virtualized computing resources over the internet. In an IaaS model, a cloud provider hosts all the components of the infrastructure that are present in the data centre. This data centre includes the storage, servers and networking hardware.
Platform as a service: Platform as a service or PaaS is a cloud computing model in which a third-party provider delivers software and hardware usually those required for the application development to all the users over the internet. A PaaS provider always hosts software and the hardware on its own infrastructure[3].
Software as a service: Software as a service or SaaS is a type of cloud service model alongside infrastructure as a service or IaaS and platform as a service or PaaS[4]. SaaS eradicates the requirement of the installation and running of the applications on their own computers or in their own data centres. The main advantage of this service model is that it eradicates the cost of hardware provision, maintenance and acquisition, along with the software installation, support and licensing.
The four deployment models of cloud computing are as follows:
Private Cloud: The cloud infrastructure is usually provisioned for the exclusive utilization by any one organization that comprises of multiple consumers like business units[5]. ii) Public Cloud: The cloud infrastructure is provisioned for open utilization by the public. It exists on the premises of the cloud provider.
Types of Cloud Computing
Hybrid Cloud: The mixture two other clouds is known as hybrid cloud. It is expensive, however, since it is comprised of two types of clouds, it has the advantages of both the clouds.
Community Cloud: The cloud infrastructure is provisioned for exclusive utilization by any specific community of customers from various organizations that have the shared concerns like policy, requirements of security, mission, and compliance considerations[6].
There are various and several cloud service providers available in the market. The major cloud service providers are as follows:
Microsoft Azure
Adobe
VMware
IBM Cloud
Rackspace
Red Hat.
These above mentioned cloud computing companies or cloud service providers help the organizations or businesses to attain their organizational goals or objectives.
2. The most important and popular cloud service providers are the Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure[1]. Apart from these three cloud computing services, there are few other cloud services. However, these are more popular than the rest.
Google Cloud Platform: The most popular products of this particular cloud service provider are the Google Compute Engine, which is the Infrastructure as a Service providing virtual machines, Google App Engine or Platform as a Service for application hosting, Big Query or Software as a service large scale database analytics and Google Cloud Functions like in beta testing[2].
Amazon Web Services: The most popular products of this particular cloud service provider are the computation, storage, Amazon EC2 Virtual Cloud Servers, analytics, mobile services, networking and content delivery, Amazon Cloud Front Global Content Delivery Network, Amazon Route 53 Scalable Domain Name System, AWS Identity and Access Management Manage User Access and Encryption Keys. Amazon Web Services was used by several popular organizations and thus this can be claimed as one of the most popular cloud services in the field of cloud computing.
Microsoft Azure: The most popular products of this particular cloud service provider are the Virtual Machines Provision Windows and Linux virtual machines in seconds, Azure free account, Virtual Network Provision private networks, optionally connect to on-premises data centres. Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing service created by Microsoft for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed data centres.
The above three cloud services are extremely popular for all organizations and they are utilized by several and various organizations.
3. Data breaches have become one of the major problems in the modern world. These breaches have resulted in crashing all of the confidential information and data[1]. In the last five years, five most significant and shocking threats or breaches have shaken the entire world. The five data breaches in the last five years with relevant details are as follows:
Deployment Models of Cloud Computing
Year 2013 Facebook breach: In June 2013, Facebook disclosed that approximately six million Facebook users had telephone numbers and personal email addresses present. They were publicly shared and hackers were exploiting them[2]. One of the security researcher founded about this breach and reported to the administrator of Facebook and thus this breach and fixed and stopped.
Year 2014 Sony Pictures Entertainment: In the year 2014, Sony Pictures Entertainment faced one of the major and significant data breaches. The employees at Sony, had their screens hijacked by hackers. The screens displayed a grinning skull. The hackers were known as the Guardians of Peace and they were responsible for stealing over 100 terabytes of confidential data[3]. The security team of the company were quick at finding out about the security breach and they quickly fixed this problem.
Year 2015 Premera Data Breach: 2015 was one of the black years for the security system of the world. In March 2015, Premera announced that they have noticed a major data breach that has eventually affected eleven million clients in the health industry. However, they found out or detected about the data breach and were able to solve the problem quickly.
Year 2016 Centene data breach: In January 2016, Centene announced that more than 950,000 members were impacted due to a major data breach. The breach resulted in the loss of the six major hard drives that had all the health information of those particular members. It even had all the personal and confidential information of those members.
Year 2017 Verizon data breach: In July 2017, Verizon organization of the United states of America suffered one of the major data breach. All the personal information of about 14 million customers was exposed in the cloud[4]. The organization however checked and stopped the data breach as soon as possible. Legal steps were also taken for this particular breach.
4. Financial fraud is a major consequence of most of the data breaches. Financial fraud in the intentional act of deception that mainly involves financial transactions for the purpose of personal gain. There are four major types of financial frauds in any business. They include embezzlement, internal theft, payoffs, kickbacks, and skimming. One of the major data breaches that occurred due to financial fraud is the case of Uber[1]. The breach that affected more than 57 million drivers and customers occurred in the year 2016.
The hackers were paid 100,000 dollars for deleting all the data. The personal information included names, bank account numbers, mobile numbers and email addresses of the customers. All the data breaches do not have a financial motivation[1]. Some of the data breaches mainly occur due to the dangerous and threatening intentions of the hackers.
Popular Cloud Service Providers
5. Big data are data sets that are utilized for revealing patterns, trends and associations[1]. The main challenges of big data include data analysis, data search, sharing, storage, and transfer and information privacy. There are three dimensions to big data known as the 3Vs or Volume, Variety and Velocity.
Big data is absolutely dissimilar from an ordinary data set. The management of massive amount of data and the innovation of data as become an extremely tedious job for all organizations. This is done simply by leveraging all the collaborative efforts and talent of the resources and the people[2]. This can be fulfilled by the implementation of the big data and its tools that are capable in storing, analyzing and processing bulk amount of data at an
extremely fast pace as compared to the traditional data processing systems. The traditional data use centralized database architecture in which large and complex problems are solved by a single computer system. Centralised architecture is costly and ineffective to process large amount of data. The solution to a problem is computed by several different computers present in a given computer network. The computers communicate to each other in order to find the solution to a problem[1]. Examples of the unstructured data include Relational Database System (RDBMS) and the spreadsheets, which only answers to the questions about what happened. Big data uses the semi-structured and unstructured data and improves the variety of the data gathered from different sources like customers, audience or subscribers[2].
Big Data is utilized in banking sectors. The five most common examples of use cases where banks and financial services firms are finding value in big data analytics are as follows:
Fraud Detection: Banks and financial services firms use analytics to differentiate fraudulent interactions from legitimate business transactions. By applying analytics and machine learning, they are able to define normal activity based on a customer’s history and distinguish it from unusual behaviour indicating fraud.
Customer Segmentation: Banks have been under pressure to change from product-centric to customer-centric businesses. One way to achieve that transformation is to better understand their customers through segmentation[3].
6. Big Data applications are useful in medicine or medical field. The applications that are utilized medicine are as follows:
Analyzing Electronic Health Records (EHRs): Doctors that are sharing EHRs can aggregate and analyze data for trends that can reduce healthcare costs. Sharing data between physicians and healthcare providers as they examine patients can reduce duplicate tests and improve patient care[1].
Control Data for Public Health Research:The medical profession is drowning in data. Medical offices and hospitals submit data about medical conditions and immunizations, but without big data, those data are meaningless[2]. Using analytics normalizes raw patient data to fill gaps in public health records that can affect regulations as well as providing better care.
References
Chen, Deyan, and Hong Zhao. “Data security and privacy protection issues in cloud computing.” In Computer Science and Electronics Engineering (ICCSEE), 2012 International Conference on, vol. 1, pp. 647-651. IEEE, 2012.
Chen, Hsinchun, Roger HL Chiang, and Veda C. Storey. “Business intelligence and analytics: From big data to big impact.” MIS quarterly 36, no. 4 (2012).
Goyal, Sumit. “Public vs private vs hybrid vs community-cloud computing: a critical review.” International Journal of Computer Network and Information Security 6, no. 3 (2014): 20.
John Walker, Saint. “Big data: A revolution that will transform how we live, work, and think.” (2014): 181-183.
McAfee, Andrew, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Thomas H. Davenport. “Big data: the management revolution.” Harvard business review 90, no. 10 (2012): 60-68.
Murdoch, Travis B., and Allan S. Detsky. “The inevitable application of big data to health care.” Jama 309, no. 13 (2013): 1351-1352.
Romanosky, Sasha, David Hoffman, and Alessandro Acquisti. “Empirical analysis of data breach litigation.” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 11, no. 1 (2014): 74-104.
Rong, Chunming, Son T. Nguyen, and Martin Gilje Jaatun. “Beyond lightning: A survey on security challenges in cloud computing.” Computers & Electrical Engineering 39, no. 1 (2013): 47-54.
Sabau, Andrei Sorin. “Survey of clustering based financial fraud detection research.” Informatica Economica 16, no. 1 (2012): 110.
West, Jarrod, and Maumita Bhattacharya. “Intelligent financial fraud detection: a comprehensive review.” Computers & Security 57 (2016): 47-66.
Xu, Xun. “From cloud computing to cloud manufacturing.” Robotics and computer-integrated manufacturing 28, no. 1 (2012): 75-86.
Zissis, Dimitrios, and Dimitrios Lekkas. “Addressing cloud computing security issues.” Future Generation computer systems 28, no. 3 (2012): 583-592.
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