Challenges and Risks

Challenges and Risks

• Despite the initial success and popularity of the cloud computing paradigm
and the extensive availability of providers and tools,
• a significant number of challenges and risks are inherent to this new model of
computing.
• Providers, developers, and end users must consider these challenges and risks
to take good advantage of cloud computing.
• Issues to be faced include user privacy, data security, data lock-in, availability
of service, disaster recovery, performance, scalability, energy-efficiency, and
programmability.
 Challenges and Risks
• (1)Security, Privacy, and Trust
• information security as a main issue: “current cloud offerings are essentially
public . . . exposing the system to more attacks.”
• For this reason there are potentially additional challenges to make cloud
computing environments as secure as in-house IT systems.
• Security and privacy affect the entire cloud computing stack, since there is a
massive use of third-party services and infrastructures that are used to host
important data or to perform critical operations.
• In this scenario, the trust toward providers is fundamental to ensure the
desired level of privacy for applications hosted in the cloud
 Challenges and Risks
• Security, Privacy, and Trust
• Legal and regulatory issues also need attention. When data are moved into the
Cloud, providers may choose to locate them anywhere on the planet.
• The physical location of data centers determines the set of laws that can be
applied to the management of data.
• For example, specific cryptography techniques could not be used because they
are not allowed in some countries.
• Similarly, country laws can impose that sensitive data, such as patient health
records, are to be stored within national borders.
 Challenges and Risks
• (2)Data Lock-In and Standardization
• A major concern of cloud computing users is about having their data locked-in
by a certain provider.
• Users may want to move data and applications out from a provider that does
not meet their requirements.
• However, in their current form, cloud computing infrastructures and platforms
do not employ standard methods of storing user data and applications.
• Consequently, they do not interoperate and user data are not portable.
• The answer to this concern is standardization.
 Challenges and Risks
• (2)Data Lock-In and Standardization
• The Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF) was formed by
organizations such as Intel, Sun, and Cisco in order to “enable a global cloud
computing ecosystem whereby organizations are able to seamlessly work
together for the purposes for wider industry adoption of cloud computing
technology.”
• The development of the Unified Cloud Interface (UCI) by CCIF aims at
creating a standard programmatic point of access to an entire cloud
infrastructure.
 Challenges and Risks
• (2)Data Lock-In and Standardization
• In the hardware virtualization sphere,
• the Open Virtual Format (OVF) aims at facilitating packing and distribution of
software to be run on VMs so that virtual appliances can be made portable—
that is, seamlessly run on hypervisor of different vendors.
 Challenges and Risks
• (3) Availability, Fault-Tolerance, and Disaster Recovery
• It is expected that users will have certain expectations about the service level
to be provided once their applications are moved to the cloud.
• These expectations include availability of the service, its overall performance,
and what measures are to be taken when something goes wrong in the system
or its components.
• In summary, users seek for a warranty before they can comfortably move their
business to the cloud.
• SLAs, which include QoS requirements, must be ideally set up between
customers and cloud computing providers to act as warranty.
 Challenges and Risks
• (3) Availability, Fault-Tolerance, and Disaster Recovery
• An SLA specifies the details of the service to be provided, including
availability and performance guarantees.
• Additionally, metrics must be agreed upon by all parties, and penalties for
violating the expectations must also be approved.
 Challenges and Risks
• (4) Resource Management and Energy-Efficiency
• One important challenge faced by providers of cloud computing services is
the efficient management of virtualized resource pools.
• Physical resources such as CPU cores, disk space, and network bandwidth
must be sliced and shared among virtual machines running potentially
heterogeneous workloads.
• The multi-dimensional nature of virtual machines complicates the activity of
finding a good mapping of VMs onto available physical hosts while
maximizing user utility.
 Challenges and Risks
• (4) Resource Management and Energy-Efficiency
• Dimensions to be considered include: number of CPUs, amount of memory,
size of virtual disks, and network bandwidth.
• Dynamic VM mapping policies may leverage the ability to suspend, migrate,
and resume VMs as an easy way of preempting low-priority allocations in
favor of higher-priority ones.
• Migration of VMs also brings additional challenges such as detecting when to
initiate a migration, which VM to migrate, and where to migrate.
 Challenges and Risks
• (4) Resource Management and Energy-Efficiency
• Another challenge concerns the outstanding amount of data to be managed in
various VM management activities.
• Such data amount is a result of particular abilities of virtual machines,
including the ability of traveling through space (i.e., migration) and time (i.e.,
check pointing and rewinding)
• operations that may be required in load balancing, backup, and recovery
scenarios.
 Challenges and Risks
• (4) Resource Management and Energy-Efficiency
• Data centers consumer large amounts of electricity. According to a data
published byHP[4], 100 server racks can consume 1.3MWof power and
another 1.3 MW are required by the cooling system, thus costing USD 2.6
million per year.
• Besides the monetary cost, data centers significantly impact the environment
in terms of CO2 emissions from the cooling systems.
• In addition to optimize application performance, dynamic resource
management can also improve utilization and consequently minimize energy
consumption in data centers.
• This can be done by judiciously consolidating workload onto smaller number
of servers and turning off idle resources