Service Availability in Cloud Computing: Threats and Best Practices
2013 (English)Independent thesis Basic level (degree of Bachelor), 10 credits / 15 HE credits
Student thesis
Abstract [en]
Cloud computing provides access to on-demand computing resources and storage space, whereby applications and data are hosted with data centers managed by third parties, on a pay-per-use price model. This allows organizations to focus on core business goals instead of managing in-house IT infrastructure.
However, as more business critical applications and data are moved to the cloud, service availability is becoming a growing concern. A number of recent cloud service disruptions have questioned the reliability of cloud environments to host business critical applications and data. The impact of these disruptions varies, but, in most cases, there are financial losses and damaged reputation among consumers.
This thesis aims to investigate the threats to service availability in cloud computing and to provide some best practices to mitigate some of these threats. As a result, we identified eight categories of threats. They include, in no particular order: power outage, hardware failure, cyber-attack, configuration error, software bug, human error, administrative or legal dispute and network dependency. A number of systematic mitigation techniques to ensure constant availability of service by cloud providers were identified. In addition, practices that can be applied by cloud customers and users of cloud services, to improve service availability were presented.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2013. , p. 71
Keywords [en]
service availability, high availability, service failure, service disruption, cloud computing, cloud outage, denial of service, security, disaster recovery.
National Category
Computer Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-28760OAI: oai:DiVA.org:lnu-28760DiVA, id: diva2:646329
Subject / course
Computer Science
Educational program
Network Security Programme, 180 credits
Presentation
2013-06-03, D1136, 351 95 Växjö, Växjö, 16:00 (English)
Supervisors
Examiners
2013-09-092013-09-092018-01-11Bibliographically approved