Cloud Management and Security

1 Introduction

This chapter introduces Cloud computing. The introduction helps the reader to get an overview of Cloud computing and its main challenges. Subsequent chapters of this book assume the reader understands the content of this chapter.

1.1 Overview

Cloud computing originates from industry (commercial requirements and needs). Governments and leading industrial bodies involved academia at early stages of adopting Cloud computing because of its promising future as an Internet-scale critical infrastructure. Involving academia would ensure that Cloud computing is critically analyzed, which helps in understanding its problems and limitations. This would also help in advancing the knowledge of this domain by defining and executing research road maps to establish next-generation trustworthy Cloud infrastructure. Moreover, academia would provide the required education in Cloud computing by developing undergraduate and postgraduate courses in this domain.

Cloud comes with enormous advantages; for example, it reduces the capital costs of newly established businesses, it reduces provisioning time of different types of services, it establishes new business models, it reduces the overhead of infrastructure management, and it extends IT infrastructures to the limits of their hosting Cloud infrastructure. Although Cloud computing is associated with such great features, it also has critical problems preventing its wider adoption by critical business applications, critical infrastructures, ...