TIM-Reproduce A Published Experiment
Background
Cloud computing is an evolving technological paradigm that has outgrown decades of research in computing, networking, virtualization and Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). The technology paradigm offers scalable and on-demand access to a pool of resources that are hosted by cloud providers in the data centers (Roy et al. 2015). Cloud computing is a widely integrated technology today based on its ability to reduce costs in the computing environment while also enhancing scalability and flexibility of the computer processes (Roy et al. 2015). As such, cloud computing has grown from a promising technology to one that is highly adopted by the fast-growing businesses in the IT industry. Considerably, cloud computing is an architectural movement that presents new ways to deploy and manage applications. Its significance is underlined by its ability to support business-critical applications, an aspect that is behind its extensive integration in the business environment (Ahuja & Mani, 2013). However, organizations have highlighted vast concerns regarding the integration of this technology ranging from security vulnerabilities to the availability of services. While cloud computing is associated with vast security vulnerabilities, the availability of critical services is a significant factor as this affects the operability of the business processes. Availability ends a critical challenge in the cloud computing paradigm as it affects access to critical services.
The paper evaluates the availability of critical services as a significant challenge in the cloud computing environment. The goal of the research is to highlight the inherent flaw of the overall approach that impedes access to business resources in the cloud environment and provides countermeasures for adoption to design a lean system that enables businesses to access services at all times. The proposal provides an overview of the literature review regarding why the problem exists, its impact on the users and its relevance and significance in the cloud computing environment. Considerably, the paper provides a detailed discussion of how the study will be undertaken relative to the goal to be achieved. Moreover, the proposal details on the hurdles likely to be encountered during the research process.
Problem Statement
Notably, cloud computing is designed to enable access to a pool of resources such as data, application, servers, and computer networks. The access to this resources is done by either a privately owned cloud or a third-party server that is situated in a data center. With this, access to the resources is made more reliable and efficient (Roy et al. 2015). Given the fact that the cloud environment utterly depends on the allocation of resources to the economy of scale and consistency, it is a cost-effective technology solution making it a viable option for most businesses. Despite this, service downtime is a significant challenge of the cloud technology (Hashem et al. 2015). The availability of different cloud providers set the stage for enhancing effectiveness in service provision. However, no single service provider can guarantee its user’s access to the critical resources at all times. While the cloud technology makes businesses reliant on their connectivity, its effective use is hampered by possible downtimes that bars access to the critical resources (Hashem et al. 2015). Thus, cloud technology is designed to provide vast benefits to its users including efficiency. However, outages negatively affect access to critical resources thereby affecting business operations.
The strength of the cloud computing technology is assessed based on its availability and reliability. Notably, availability denotes the possibility of accessing resources when needed while taking into consideration the time it takes for the resources to be provisioned. Comparatively, reliability highlights the availability of resources at all times without disruption and how often the platform fails (Hashem et al. 2015). An important aspect that poses significant problems in the cloud computing environment is the possible downtime. Regardless of the seamless nature of the architecture that is designed to foster reliability and availability of resources, cloud technology tends to experience service downtime, denial of service attacks, equipment outages, performance slowdowns, and natural disasters. Research has shown that cloud providers have experienced service outages in the past, such as Amazon, a problem that impedes service provision to users (Roy et al. 2015). Such challenges have enhanced uncertainty and doubt among cloud users thereby prompting the need to design approaches to address the inherent flaws of the technological architecture. The level of reliability and availability of resources in the cloud environment is a serious issue as it affects effective service provisions to the customers.
Availability is a significant challenge in cloud computing environments. Due to the critical services provided by most organizations, the systems should be available at all times. This ensures that users can have regular access to their data and applications (Ahuja & Mani, 2013). Despite this, achieving high availability in cloud computing is challenging than initially perceived. While most critical business applications are running in the cloud computing environment, there are inherent flaws in the overall approach. The flaws are not appropriate for mission-critical workloads as they impede access to applications and data that are vital to an organization’s processes (Roy et al. 2015). Given the fact that the cloud computing environments are subject to an outage, organizations are concerned that their demands such as critical applications and data cannot be accessed.
Within the cloud environment, various virtual machines are used to host the same physical server infrastructure. The standards model used by most cloud service providers to make resources such as data and applications available to its users is the public cloud (Hashem et al. 2015). While the public cloud services might be free, vast concerns are associated with its use, particularly the availability of resources in critical moments (Ahuja & Mani, 2013). Notably, irrespective of whether the cloud is operating on private, public or hybrid models, availability is an important aspect of the virtualization technology that ought to be addressed. Such problems involve system overflows due to the excessive combination of the VM to a physical server which affects resource availability (Aldossary & Allen, 2016). Because of these issues, the cloud computing environments are vulnerable to attacks such as the Denial of Service (DoS) which makes the server inaccessible to the legitimate users (Shukhman et al. 2015). With this, businesses are increasingly wary of the cloud computing service providers as they need high resource availability to enhance their normal processes. In this context, providers must guarantee that legitimate users will have high availability of their resources (critical applications and data). Therefore, the availability of resources in cloud computing is a significant issue that ought to be addressed.
Goal
The study explores reliability and availability of resources in cloud technology and how this hampers effective service provision for businesses. The goal of the study is to highlight the inherent flaw of the overall approach that impedes access to business resources in the cloud environment and provides countermeasures for adoption to design a lean system that enables businesses to access services at all times. By evaluating the reliability and availability of resources in the cloud architecture, it can be identified with ease measures for adoption to address the inherent flaw of the technology. As such, the study conducts a review of the reliability and availability of resources in the cloud environment to ascertain its impact on businesses and mechanisms for adoption to improve the system. Through this, the study explores major issues including service downtime, denial of service attacks, equipment outages, performance slowdowns, and natural disasters. To ascertain its success, the study will evaluate whether the proposed measures are effective in addressing both reliability and availability of resources.
Relevance and Significance
Security is an aspect of concern in the cloud environment. This is enhanced by the extensive vulnerabilities associated with the system, susceptibilities that can be readily exploited by the cyber attackers (Ali, Khan & Vasilakos, 2015). With this, cyber-attacks are a major cause of service unavailability in cloud computing. By executing Denial of Service attacks, the attacker can obtain authorized access to the system processes similar to that of the legitimate users. Given the fact that most organizations need their resources all the time, the DoS is catastrophic as it impedes access to critical services. By using all the resources, other system users cannot access the services (Shukhman et al. 2015). Besides, the attacker can slow access to the critical services through the use of Denial of Service attacks. The lack of virtual IPs for the virtual machines is a significant factor in the unavailability of business-critical resources. During the setup process, the virtual machines assume a regular IP address that never changes (Ali, Khan & Vasilakos, 2015). With this, increased traffic results in system slow down or failure thereby impeding access to the critical services. While the static IP address is administered to maintain the virtual machines, increased traffic can result in system slow down or failure. Thus, the lack of virtual IPs for the virtual machines often results in resource unavailability for the cloud computing systems. Additionally, system overflows due to an excessive combination of the VM to physical server affects resource availability.
Service unavailability in the clouds is enhanced by the inherent flaws of the overall approach in its set up. For instance, most cloud providers leverage on out of the box clustering or virtual machines solutions migration. Notably, these features are not only complex to manage but also fail to adequately protect the applications for transaction loss (Noor et al. 2013). Considerably, the availability approaches solely focus on the discrete application for the virtual machines over the entire application service chain. Most of the cloud computing technologies are designed around commoditized software and hardware (Noor et al. 2013). As such, the monitoring and management of the system activity are left to the cloud management software. With this, there is a lag time between system outage and the management software noticing the problem to start the recovery process (Noor et al. 2013).
System downtime hampers the legitimate cloud users from accessing their resources which can be catastrophic. Even though availability differs among the users, its effect is quantified on the accessibility of business-critical resources (Santos et al. 2017). Moreover, resource unavailability does not only affect user experience but also incurs direct costs for both the organizations and the cloud providers. As such, the study’s significance is to evaluate the causative factors of resource unavailability in cloud computing to identify the failure point and propose effective countermeasures for adoption. The identification of the failure points is important as this will serve future research studies for cloud provider seeking to improve service provision. Thus, the outcome of the study serves to address resources reliability and availability in the cloud environment by identifying failure points.
Literature Review
Cloud computing is a multifaceted technology that offers scalable and on-demand access to a pool of resources that are hosted by cloud providers in the data centers. Cloud computing is a widely integrated technology today based on its ability to reduce costs in the computing environment while also enhancing scalability and flexibility of the computer processes. Despite its promise, vast concerns have been highlighted regarding resources reliability and availability (Hashem et al. 2015). Notably, the strength of the cloud computing technology is assessed based on its availability and reliability of resources. The existence of different failure points in the system hampers access to business-critical services, an aspect that is of significant concern in the IT sector (Aldossary & Allen, 2016). Inefficient reliability and availability of resources are attributed to different factors including system vulnerability to attack, lack of virtual IPs for the virtual machines, system overflows due to an excessive combination of the VM to physical servers and inherent flaw of the overall approach deployed by cloud providers (Santos et al. 2017). The existence of the problem poses vats implications to the business, aspects that not only bar business operations but also incur additional costs.
System vulnerability is a major aspect hampering resource reliability and availability in the cloud environment. The existence of different failure points in the cloud environment predisposes the infrastructure to third-party intrusion to instigate Denial of Service (DoS) attacks (Aldossary & Allen, 2016). Cyber attackers can infect the cloud architecture with a malicious program such a botnet that enables them to execute DoS by obtaining access to the system processes similar to that of authentic cloud users (Aldossary & Allen, 2016). The DoS attacks are castigated to hamper access to business-critical resources such as applications software by either slowing down the system or impeding access for the legitimate users (Santos et al. 2017). The traditional countermeasure to this attack is increasing the number of critical resources, but a serious problem occurs when the intruder occourstrate an attack using the botnet. The current network countermeasures are not effective in preventing the DoS attacks as they cannot stop the deluge of the traffic and cannot distinguish between good and bad traffic. However, Intrusive Prevention Systems (IPS) are effective countermeasures particularly if the attacks can be identified or have pre-existing signatures (Ahuja & Mani, 2013). Despite this, such countermeasures are ineffective when there is legitimate content with bad intentions. Moreover, the use of firewalls is not only ineffective but also vulnerable to different types of attacks as the attackers can bypass them (Santos et al. 2017). Thus, the current countermeasures are ineffective in curtailing DoS attacks that attribute to resource unavailability.
The use of cloud technology infers that data and applications will be mover under the control of a third-party (Aldossary & Allen, 2016). Based on the cloud-services delivery model, clouds with virtual perimeters are created together with security controls that are shared between the cloud service provider and the customer. The shared-responsibility model is associated with vast security and resource availability challenges to the business operations. The biggest challenge is accessing business-critical services at all time as this is imperative for business success (Santos et al. 2017). However, this is impeded by the lack of virtual IPs for the virtual machines and system overflows due to an excessive combination of the VM to physical servers. The lack of virtual IPs for the virtual machines results in increased traffic, an aspect that is enhanced by the fact that the security countermeasures cannot differentiate between good and bad traffic. This results in system downtime thereby hampering access to business-critical services. Moreover, system overflow due to the combination of the virtual machines to the physical serves predisposes the cloud technology to third-party intrusions which result in system downtime. This is a significant factor that fosters DoS attacks on the system thereby impeding access to resources.
The overall system approach integrated for use by cloud providers hampers resource availability and reliability at all times. The widely used approaches are challenging to manage and fail to integrate robust security mechanisms to prevent DoS attacks. Having evolved as a promising technology in the past decade, cloud technology is facing negative shifts to its use as users are wary of its capacity to meet business demands (Santos et al. 2017). There is a need for a universal model to be adopted by the cloud providers to guarantee resource reliability and availability. Researchers have proposed the integration of a HAIL (high availability and integrity layer) model to address the issue of server unavailability (Bowers, Juels & Oprea, 2010). The HAIL model is designed to distribute data across different servers to ensure resource availability at all times. The HAIL model can be adopted by cloud service providers as it leverages on unreliable components to create a reliable solution that is cost effective (Bowers, Juels & Oprea, 2010).
Approach
For this research, secondary data analysis will be used to evaluate resource reliability and availability in cloud computing. The research methodology aims at evaluating resource availability in cloud technologies by collecting information from case studies and peer-reviewed sources (Gall et al. 2014). Extensive information will be obtained from peer-reviewed research to establish the basis of resource reliability and availability in cloud computing and the countermeasures for adoption to curtail this problem. The articles and case studies for research will be obtained from library databases to determine why the problem exists, its impact and the current countermeasures in practice. Conducting extensive research from secondary sources is augmented by the notion that the problem cannot be quantified (Gall et al. 2014).
The data will be collected and then assessed to discuss the problem of resource availability in cloud computing extensively. The identified articles will be evaluated through an established inclusion and exclusion criteria relative to its significance to the problem of discussion in cloud computing. Considerably, keywords such as reliability and availability will be used to identify relevant articles for study and use for research (Gall et al. 2014). The findings from the research articles will be tabulated based on the significance relative to resource availability (Gall et al. 2014). Given the fast changes in the cloud computing paradigm, vast challenges will be encountered such as identifying effective measures for curtailing system intrusion. However, this can be addressed by determining system design flaws exploited by the attackers. Therefore, secondary data analysis will establish the basis of collecting extensive information regarding resource reliability and availability in cloud computing.
References
Ahuja, S. P., & Mani, S. (2013). Availability of services in the era of cloud computing. Network and Communication Technologies, 1(1), 2.
Aldossary, S., & Allen, W. (2016). Data security, privacy, availability and integrity in cloud computing: issues and current solutions. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, 7(4), 485-498.
Ali, M., Khan, S. U., & Vasilakos, A. V. (2015). Security in cloud computing: Opportunities and challenges. Information sciences, 305, 357-383.
Bowers, K. D., Juels, A., & Oprea, A. (2010, November). HAIL: A high-availability and integrity layer for cloud storage. In Proceedings of the 16th ACM conference on Computer and communications security (pp. 187-198). ACM.
Gall, M. D., Gall, J. P., Borg, W. R., & Meredith (Mark) D. Gall. (2014). Applying educational research: How to read, do, and use research to solve problems of practice. Pearson.
Hashem, I. A. T., Yaqoob, I., Anuar, N. B., Mokhtar, S., Gani, A., & Khan, S. U. (2015). The rise of “big data” on cloud computing: Review and open research issues. Information systems, 47, 98-115.
Noor, T. H., Sheng, Q. Z., Zeadally, S., & Yu, J. (2013). Trust management of services in cloud environments: Obstacles and solutions. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 46(1), Article 12, pp. 1-30.
Roy, A., Sarkar, S., Ganesan, R., & Goel, G. (2015). Secure the Cloud: From the Perspective of a Service-Oriented Organization. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 47(3), Article 41, pp.1-30
Santos, G. L., Endo, P. T., Gonçalves, G., Rosendo, D., Gomes, D., Kelner, J., & Mahloo, M. (2017, July). Analyzing the IT subsystem failure impact on availability of cloud services. In Computers and Communications (ISCC), 2017 IEEE Symposium on (pp. 717-723). IEEE.
Shukhman, A., Polezhaev, P., Ushakov, Y., Legashev, L., Toarasov, V., & Bakhareva, N. (2015). Development of network security tools for enterprise software-defined networks. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Security of Information and Networks (pp. 224-228). New York, NY: ACM.