Cloud Management and Security

Preface

Cloud computing is a new concept, building on well-established industrial technologies. The interactions between the technologies behind Cloud computing had never been of great interest in the academic domain before the Cloud era. The emergence of Cloud computing as an Internet-scale critical infrastructure has greatly encouraged the collaboration between industry and academia to analyze this infrastructure. Such collaborations would help in understanding the vulnerabilities of Cloud and defining research agendas to address the identified vulnerabilities. In fact, funding bodies and governments have already allocated generous grants to encourage both academic and industrial collaboration on research activities in Cloud computing. In addition, some universities have very recently introduced Cloud computing-related subjects as part of their undergraduate and postgraduate degrees to advance the knowledge in this domain.

Cloud computing has emerged from industry to academia without transferring the knowledge behind this domain. This results in confusion and misunderstanding. Most of the available trusted resources are industrial and scattered around hundreds of technical manuals and white papers. These cover different complex domains (e.g., infrastructure management, distributed database management systems, clustering technology, software architecture, security management, and network management). These domains are not easy to understand, as integrated science, for many ...