Cloud computing has emerged as the primary choice for developers in developing applications that require high-performance computing. Virtualization technology has helped in the distribution of resources to multiple users. Increased use of cloud infrastructure has led to the challenge of developing a load balancing mechanism to provide optimized use of resources and better performance. Round robin and least connections load balancing algorithms have been developed to allocate user requests across a cluster of servers in the cloud in a time-bound manner. In this paper, we have applied the round robin and least connections approach of load balancing to HAProxy, virtual machine clusters and web servers. The experimental results are visualized and summarized using Apache Jmeter and a further comparative study of round robin and least connections is also depicted. Experimental setup and results show that the round robin algorithm performs better as compared to the least connections algorithm in all measuring parameters of load balancer in this paper.

Financialization has contributed to economic growth but has caused scandals, misselling, rogue trading, tax evasion, and market speculation. To a certain extent, it has also created problems in social and economic instability. It is an important aspect of Enterprise Security, Privacy, and Risk (ESPR), particularly in risk research and analysis. In order to minimize the damaging impacts caused by the lack of regulatory compliance, governance, ethical responsibilities, and trust, we propose a Business Integrity Modeling and Analysis (BIMA) framework to unify business integrity with performance using big data predictive analytics and business intelligence. Comprehensive services include modeling risk and asset prices, and consequently, aligning them with business strategies, making our services, according to market trend analysis, both transparent and fair. The BIMA framework uses Monte Carlo simulation, the Black–Scholes–Merton model, and the Heston model for performing financial, operational, and liquidity risk analysis and present outputs in the form of analytics and visualization. Our results and analysis demonstrate supplier bankruptcy modeling, risk pricing, high-frequency pricing simulations, London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) rate simulation, and speculation detection results to provide a variety of critical risk analysis. Our approaches to tackle problems caused by financial services and the operational risk clearly demonstrate that the BIMA framework, as the outputs of our data analytics research, can effectively combine integrity and risk analysis together with overall business performance and can contribute to operational risk research.

As one of the most significant components of financial technology (FinTech), blockchain technology arouses the interests of numerous investors in China, and the number of companies engaged in this field rises rapidly. The emotion of investors has an effect on stock returns, which is a hot topic in behavioral finance. Blockchain is an essential part of FinTech, and with the fast development of this technology, investors’ sentiment varies as well. The online information that directly reflects investors’ mood could be utilized for mining and quantifying to construct a sentiment index. For a better understanding of how well some factors adequately explain the return of stocks related to blockchain companies in the Chinese stock market, the Fama-French three-factor model (FFTFM) will be introduced in this paper. Furthermore, sentiment could be a new independent variable to enhance the explanatory power of the FFTFM. A comparison between those two models reveals that the sentiment factor could raise the explanatory power. The results also indicate that the Chinses blockchain industry does not own the size effect and book-to-market effect.

Large data volumes and the inability to analyse them enables fraudulent activities to go unnoticed in supply chain management processes such as procurement, warehouse management and inventory management. This fraud increases the cost of the supply chain management and a fraud detection mechanism is necessary to reduce the risk of fraud in this business area. This study was carried out in order to develop a data warehouse design that supports forensic analytics by using the Benford’s law in order to detect fraud. The approach relies on a generic and re-usable store procedure for data analytics. The data warehouse was tested with two datasets collected from an operational supply chain database from the inventory management and warranty claims processes. The results of the research showed that the supply chain data analyzed obeys to Benford’s theory and that parameterized stored procedures with Dynamic SQL provide an excellent tool to analyze data in the supply chain for possible fraud detection. The implications of the results of the study are that the Benford’s law can be used to detect fraud in the supply chain with the help of parameterized stored procedures and a data ware house, this can ease the workload of the fraud analyst in the supply chain function. Although the research only used data from the inventory management and warranty claim processes, the proposed store procedures can be extended to any process in the supply chain making the results generalizable to the supply chain management process.

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) supports best practices, reengineering activities and IT service support processes. ITIL framework only provides recommendations, and companies need to utilize this framework to improve their I

This study aims to show that application of Time-Driven Activity Based Costing (TDABC) to the managementof cost of Information Technology (IT) Services operations and how it can be used to achieve significant costreduction. To achieve this; a case study organization was used and the scope of activities was limited toTechnical Services department Operations units. Interviews were conducted with the unit managers and theiroperations staff. These units are the Network Operations Centre, Data Centre, Service Desk and Field Servicesunits. These units provide support to existing services and satisfy requests that involve modification of theseservices. From the interview, a list of services were developed and linked to activities and time to execute eachwas provided by the operational staff. Time equations were developed from the activity groups that supportedeach type of service. Capacity cost rates were derived per unit by obtaining a ratio of the monthly cost ofrunning each unit and the practical time resource capacity of each unit. A TDABC model was then simulatedwith Microsoft Excel; which incorporated the activities, the time to deliver each and the capacity cost rate toderive the cost of delivering a service. Data for six months of service request, incident and change orders wereobtained to simulate a test scenario. The result of the test showed that two variations (out of six) of that incidenttype cost more than 75% of the overall cost of that incident type, though they constitute about 30% of theincident type. This study showed that TDABC is an effective tool in identification of costly processes whichmay then allow IT operations managers and supervisors to take critical decisions about cost control, charge-backor costing of services.