The development of cloud computing services is speeding up the rate in which the organizations outsource their computational services or sell their idle computational resources. Even though migrating to the cloud remains a tempting trend from a financial perspective, there are several other aspects that must be taken into account by companies before they decide to do so. One of the most important aspect refers to security: while some cloud computing security issues are inherited from the solutions adopted to create such services, many new security questions that are particular to these solutions also arise, including those related to how the services are organized and which kind of service/data can be placed in the cloud. Aiming to give a better understanding of this complex scenario, in this article we identify and classify the main security concerns and solutions in cloud computing, and propose a taxonomy of security in cloud computing, giving an overview of the current status of security in this emerging technology.
Network slicing (NS) is becoming an essential element of service management and orchestration in communication networks, starting from mobile cellular networks and extending to a global initiative. NS can reshape the deployment and operation of traditional services, support the introduction of new ones, vastly advance how resource allocation performs in networks, and notably change the user experience. Most of these promises still need to reach the real world, but they have already demonstrated their capabilities in many experimental infrastructures. However, complexity, scale, and dynamism are pressuring for a Machine Learning (ML)-enabled NS approach in which autonomy and efficiency are critical features. This trend is relatively new but growing fast and attracting much attention. This article surveys Artificial Intelligence-enabled NS and its potential use in current and future infrastructures. We have covered state-of-the-art ML-enabled NS for all network segments and organized the literature according to the phases of the NS life cycle. We also discuss challenges and opportunities in research on this topic.
24 April 2014 in IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics
Security is one of the most imperative requirements for the success of systems that deal with highly sensitive data, such as medical information. However, many existing mobile health solutions focused on collecting patients' data at their homes that do not include security among their main requirements. Aiming to tackle this issue, this paper presents SecourHealth, a lightweight security framework focused on highly sensitive data collection applications. SecourHealth provides many security services for both stored and in-transit data, displaying interesting features such as tolerance to lack of connectivity (a common issue when promoting health in remote locations) and the ability to protect data even if the device is lost/stolen or shared by different data collection agents. Together with the system's description and analysis, we also show how SecourHealth can be integrated into a real data collection solution currently deployed in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil.
The term fog computing was coined in 2012. However, the concept of pushing data and application logic to the network edges is not a novelty. Similar proposals were observed with edge computing, from the early 2000s, and cloudlets, from 2009. In fact, the cloudlet concept is a subset of edge computing applied to mobile networks and the fog concept is a subset of edge computing applied to Internet of Things (IoT). This paper demystifies these concepts and provides a comprehensive survey of references from academia and industry. It analyzes the terminology and dimensions of performance, security, and governance, based on a taxonomy proposed and presented in the paper. In addition we provide a thorough analysis of related topics, identifying the main research areas correlated to edge computing. Finally, we draw conclusions regarding the state of the art and the future of edge computing.