Security Issues in Delivering Infrastucture as a Service in Cloud Computing and Business - Literature review Example

Introduction The main purpose of this document is to explore the infrastructure as service (IaaS) paradigm introduced by cloud computing. Cloud Computing has introduced new traditions of administration and management of computing assets. It allows offering the computing resources to public as a service. Now a day’s many cloud service provider are adopting the trend to provide resources following the infrastructure as a service model. Cloud computing is a very rapidly and extensively evolving paradigm in the world of information technology and it is basically the resultant of the trend of service provision to remote users. The theme of cloud computing is that all computational resources and assets are offered by the cloud service providers to the remote users all around the globe as a service. It does not require the users to have proper knowledge and proficiency in a particular domain or technology in order to manage the resources and user can access them through internet. Cloud computing is a fairly innovative computing model and has been prominent in the field of information technology over past years. The cloud computing model enables the subscribers to utilize the computing resources and assets in the time of need, without investing higher amount of money and frees them from the worries about the complication involved in adopting other options. Nevertheless the huge number of implementations that have gotten so much higher reputation among the community of IT are oriented towards a particular business and are commercial so it does not supports the users with complex and bigger requirements and relatively little financial resources. (Vincenzo D. Cunsolo et al, 2010, Juan D. O sorio, 2012) Cloud computing that is a modern business paradigm, involves the provision of extraordinarily scalable computing assets as a service to individual subscribers or the organizations. Companies are now adopting a trend of replacing the older IT infrastructure by consuming the ‘Infrastructure as service’ model offered by cloud computing paradigm in order to get better scalability of computing resources and to make lesser operating cost. The fundamental business of an infrastructure as a service cloud is to set up an instance of virtual machines, on-demand, for agreed period of time. The specifications (e.g. total memory storage, required operating system, executables) of the virtual machines are decided in a agreement between the cloud service provider and the consumer and service is usually provided according to some measure of QoS( Quality of Service). On the other hand, when we are gaining the benefit of reduction in the amount of investment to adopt a new IT infrastructure and getting added adaptability, giving a commercial, third part business (service providers) the access over company’s crucial assets opens the doors for security and privacy threats and risks. (Xin Wan et al, 2012, David Villegas et al, 2012). In cloud computing, Infrastructure as a service model comes with many security risks and threats. Although it offer the service consumers, many advantages, the security leakages in the environment of cloud computing has proven to be the most prominent hurdle in its acceptance. At the moment, the clouds that offer services for general users such as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is basically consumed to host infrastructures based on a multi-tier architecture. Such kind of infrastructures that consist of interrelated web, other application softwares, and servers to host databases which are in turn synchronized with subscriber company’s databases. At the same time as adopting this paradigm improves the scalability of IT infrastructure, it may make the company’s significant and confidential data prone to security and privacy threats. (Sören Bleikertz et al, 2010) The document in structured as follows: the next section discusses the cloud computing. Then Infrastructure as service is discussed. Further the security considerations in infrastructure as a service paradigm in cloud computing environment are highlighted. The last section summarizes the conclusion. Cloud Computing Cloud computing technology has came forth as shared resource computing pool, designed over a network containing server, storage services and other applications in its infrastructure, ensuring prompt supply and release of resources through the interaction with service provider. Rapid progression in the field of cloud computing technology has introduced the model of cloud storage examples include AmazonWeb Services, Google App Engine, and Software as a Service (SaaS) applications provided by the companies like Salesforce.com. According to (Tharam Dillon et al, 2010), Cloud computing is a modern computing paradigm that allows the subscribers at the remote location to access a common pool of computing resources, configured according to their needs and demands. These resources may include web/application servers, networks, storage devices, software applications and other services. The main advantage is that these resources can be acquired and consumed rapidly and it involves a very nominal interaction with the service providers and less management effort to release those resources. A cloud computing environment usually involves five elements that form the basis of a cloud: first one is the self serving capability of consumer when it is required at some instance of time to acquire some resources that are required to avail a particular business opportunity. So consumer can subscribe to the cloud and can automatically avail the resources such as computing nodes, application softwares, networks etc. with a minimal interaction with the service providers. Secondly, cloud computing allows user to access the computing resources remotely through a variety of client application such as desktop application clients, mobile clients running diverse operating systems, provided that these clients have the access to the internet. Third element of cloud computing focuses on the collection of resources, in a cloud computing environment, where the resources are pooled so that multiple subscriber may subscribe to the cloud and use those resources simultaneously. The resources are usually pooled using different mechanisms such as multi- tenancy or the virtualization of resources so user can access the virtual or physical resources simultaneously according to their demands. This virtualization results in the invisibility of resource with respect to the locality and state of those resources (physical/virtual). So the service consumers are not even aware of the fact that where and how their data is going to be saved. The fourth element is the added flexibility where service consumers can right away start consuming the resources rather than signing long agreements and can release the resources immediately if the resources are no more required. Furthermore, service consumer can consume the resources for infinite period of time i.e. according to their demands and can even demand for more resources if they need to scale up the resources to meet a business requirement. Fifth element in a cloud computing environment is the calculated service which means that even if the resource pooling is essential when provisioning the resource service to the consumer, proper criterions and methods are employed in order to measure the utilization of resources by each service consumer. Read More