Security Designs for the Cloud, IoT, and Social Networking

Foreword

The distributed computing paradigm emerged as an alternative to expensive supercomputers to increase modularity and flexibility of computing infrastructures. Cloud computing represents the most consolidated distributed computing model widely adopted in private and business applications because it provides massive availability of computation and storage resources on demand. Looking at the future of Cloud computing it is easy to understand that it will be exploited in many different sectors which can benefit a lot from such a flexible and efficient technology. Indeed, the market of Cloud computing is changing.

Internet of Things (IoT) projects were still at the beginning stage in 2015, thus IoT workloads were only a small proportion of public cloud environments. There are currently 6.4 billion IoT devices in use around the world. Their number, capabilities, as well as their scope of use, keeps growing and changing rapidly. Gartner forecasts the number of IoT devices will reach 20.8 billion by 2020, and projects that by then IoT service spending will reach $1,534 billion and hardware spending $1,477 billion. IoT technologies are becoming strategic for the future competitiveness of enterprises that are investing in innovation and in a digital transformation. Moreover, public cloud systems offer perfect services for backend environments for IoT services and devices.

To fit IoT requirements, new distributed computing models have been investigated in the literature (e.g., ...