Cloud Management and Security

13 Case Study

This chapter presents a case study of some of the concepts discussed in the book to address real-life challenges. The first section describes the scenario and subsequent sections address issues building on the scenario.

13.1 Scenario

This section describes a scenario for using a home healthcare system in Cloud computing. The scenario is based on a hospital which provides home services to clients. The services are accessible through web portals that are provided through the hospital’s website. These services are hosted on a Cloud infrastructure using the IaaS service type. Users should not need to be aware of the existence of the Cloud, as all technicalities must be transparent to them. Users might include patients, care givers (patient family members), hospital staff (e.g., general practitioners, medical consultants, psychiatrists), and other collaborating organizations with the hospital (e.g., research centers).

System administrators of the Cloud allocate virtual resources and manage them based on a pre-agreed SLA with the hospital. This includes allocating VMs, virtual storage, networking, and managing them. The hospital, however, is in charge of installing and maintaining the operating system and all software packages which are needed to run the hospital application. For example, the hospital is in charge of maintaining the operating system, database management system, application servers, and developing and deploying the hospital application. The hospital ...