Assured Cloud Computing

Book excerpt: Explores key challenges and solutions to assured cloud computing today and provides a provocative look at the face of cloud computing tomorrow This book offers readers a comprehensive suite of solutions for resolving many of the key challenges to achieving high levels of assurance in cloud computing. The distillation of critical research findings generated by the Assured Cloud Computing Center of Excellence (ACC-UCoE) of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, it provides unique insights into the current and future shape of robust, dependable, and secure cloud-based computing and data cyberinfrastructures. A survivable and distributed cloud-computing-based infrastructure can enable the configuration of any dynamic systems-of-systems that contain both trusted and partially trusted resources and services sourced from multiple organizations. To assure mission-critical computations and workflows that rely on such systems-of-systems it is necessary to ensure that a given configuration does not violate any security or reliability requirements. Furthermore, it is necessary to model the trustworthiness of a workflow or computation fulfillment to a high level of assurance. In presenting the substance of the work done by the ACC-UCoE, this book provides a vision for assured cloud computing illustrating how individual research contributions relate to each other and to the big picture of assured cloud computing. In addition, the book: Explores dominant themes in cloud-based systems, including design correctness, support for big data and analytics, monitoring and detection, network considerations, and performance Synthesizes heavily cited earlier work on topics such as DARE, trust mechanisms, and elastic graphs, as well as newer research findings on topics, including R-Storm, and RAMP transactions Addresses assured cloud computing concerns such as game theory, stream processing, storage, algorithms, workflow, scheduling, access control, formal analysis of safety, and streaming Bringing together the freshest thinking and applications in one of today’s most important topics, Assured Cloud Computing is a must-read for researchers and professionals in the fields of computer science and engineering, especially those working within industrial, military, and governmental contexts. It is also a valuable reference for advanced students of computer science.