Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT) is a private university located in&nbsp;Tamil Nadu, India. Founded in 1984, as Vellore Engineering College, the institution offers 20 undergraduate, 34 postgraduate, four integrated and four research programs. It has campuses in Vellore, Amravati, Bhopal and Chennai.

VIT is one of the top ranked private universities in India according to NIRF, THE and QS Rankings.&nbsp;Govt. of India has recognized&nbsp;VIT, Vellore as an&nbsp;Institution of Eminence. This has allowed VIT to take independent quality initiatives and move up in world ranking.

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In the field of computer science, cloud computing plays an inevitable role in offering on-demand services to end users. The capability, and hence the advantage, of a cloud environment is widened when multiple clouds interact. However, this interaction is usually done in a static environment and/or with the help of insecure brokers. To the best of our knowledge, the Cloud Inter-operation Toolkit (CIT) is the only work that has broken this barrier to enable a dynamic and broker-less inter-cloud environment. In this work, we aim to improve the security measures in such an environment and to further optimize the resources and time consumed to establish the environment. A novel resource provisioning technique is also proposed for such an environment to ensure that resource accessibility by the users is not interrupted and to effectively utilize the computing resources. Furthermore, taking CIT a step forward, it is enhanced to support multiple cloud service models, thereby making it superior to all other existing inter-cloud facilitating approaches. © 2020, Springer Nature B.V.

Computer Science

School of Computer Science and Engineering

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Journal of Grid Computing

Enhancing the Cloud Inter-operation Toolkit (CIT) to Support Multiple Cloud Service Models

With the increase in the number of applications that are deployed and executed in a cloud, cloud service providers face several maintenance related issues due to the high volume of data involved. The inability to effectively organize the information for decision making can have a serious impact on business decision making. The use of a cloud’s storage facilities for data backup and archiving provides flexibility and data preservation features at a very low cost. In this paper, we present an efficient data management system that can archive, store and manage information effectively. The massive amount of data in the cloud is grouped based on Jaccard Similarity into six different buckets. Two sets of data retention policies are proposed for the cloud archive framework. These policies are applied to each of the buckets individually to identify the data to be archived. Additionally, homomorphic encryption is applied to provide a level of security to the data to be archived. This data is archived into the cloud to provide a data storage environment as a service that is optimized for long term data retention, security and that is compliant with the data retention policy. This framework eventually improves the availability, confidentiality and reduces the access latency significantly. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018.

Communications in Computer and Information Science

Secure Data Archiving Using Enhanced Data Retention Policies

One of the principle features on which cloud environments operate is the scaling up and down of resources based on users' needs, called elasticity. This feature is limited to the cloud's physical resources. This article proposes to enhance the elasticity of a cloud in an intelligent manner by communicating with an optimal external cloud (EC) and borrowing additional resources from it when the cloud runs out of resources. This inter-cloud communication is secured by a model whose structure is similar to the Kerberos protocol. To choose the optimal EC for a particular request of a user, a list of parameters, collectively termed as RePVoCRaD, are enumerated. Once chosen, trust is established with the chosen EC and inter-cloud communication begins. While existing works deal with third parties to establish or secure inter-cloud communication, this work is novel in that there is absence of third parties in the entire process, thereby reducing security threats and additional costs involved. Evaluating this work based on turnaround time and transaction success rate, in a real-time cloud environment, it is seen that the cloud's elasticity is so enhanced that it successfully accommodates its users' additional demands by the fastest means possible. Copyright © 2018, IGI Global.

International Journal of Intelligent Information Technologies

Securely communicating with an optimal cloud for intelligently enhancing a cloud's elasticity

A cloud's elasticity which makes it attractive is limited to its physical resources. As a measure to prevent this limitation from being a hindrance to the attraction, the cloud inter-operates with other clouds. This improves its resource strength by borrowing necessary resources from the clouds with which it inter-operates. Normally, this borrowing happens from one cloud to satisfy one request arriving to it, thereby enhancing its elasticity to a certain extent. Further enhancement is achieved by horizontal scaling across clouds to satisfy a single request. In this work, the enhancement is taken one step further to propose a novel residue-based resource provisioning technique for a cloud to perform horizontal scaling by splitting a request dynamically based on the resource availability in itself and in the clouds with which it inter-operates. Also, a greedy technique is presented to rank clouds and hence, additionally contribute to the enhancement of elasticity and, in turn, to the effectiveness of the resource provisioning technique used in inter-operating cloud environments. Results obtained from real-time heterogeneous cloud environments prove the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. © 2018 Elsevier Inc.

International Journal of Approximate Reasoning

A residue-based approach for resource provisioning by horizontal scaling across heterogeneous clouds

A cloud's elasticity is enhanced by inter-operating with other clouds and borrowing resources from them. Hence, a request from any such inter-operating cloud's user is fulfilled with resources of some individual cloud in the network. However, the request is denied on unavailability of sufficient resources in any individual cloud. In this work, this denial of a user's request is prevented by obtaining resources from multiple clouds and hence, the probability of satisfying the request is improved. This proposal intends to replace the existing resource provisioning technique in an open framework, Cloud Inter-operation Toolkit (CIT), to achieve an increased transaction success rate which is evident from the experimental results obtained from a real-time heterogeneous cloud environment set up using Eucalyptus, OpenNebula and OpenStack. In spite of satisfying a request with resources from multiple clouds, these resources are aggregated and provided in a way that is easily accessible by the user. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd

Computers and Electrical Engineering

Horizontal scaling and aggregation across heterogeneous clouds for resource provisioning

Inter-operation with other clouds, External Clouds (ECs), enhances elasticity of a cloud. In situations where an EC shuts down for maintenance or other purposes, the cloud that borrows resources from the EC must provide alternate resources to its users, whereas it does not usually do so, leading to loss or unavailability of resources to these users. Our work concentrates on this problem which appears to be unsolved to the best of our knowledge. We develop a toolkit, coined ‘Cloud Inter-operation Toolkit (CIT)', to handle this particular scenario, in addition to providing a sound inter-operation and all resource provisioning activities in an easier and less tedious manner. Thus, CIT makes the cloud highly tolerant to the shutting down of ECs that have provided resources to the cloud's users, thereby guaranteeing a more reliable and trustworthy cloud. As our work is a solution to an untouched problem, two new evaluation parameters have been introduced to study its effectiveness - Clot Time and Degree of Fault Tolerance. There is a healthy tolerance to the shutting down of ECs and resource provisioning is uninterrupted to the maximum extent possible, as is evident from the results obtained by evaluating our work. Thus, the successful cloud inter-operation provided by CIT enhances elasticity and ensures a high Transaction Success Rate while keeping the Turnaround Time as low as possible. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd

Journal of Network and Computer Applications

CIT: A Cloud Inter-operation Toolkit to enhance elasticity and tolerate shut down of external clouds

Techniques of borrowing resources from external clouds to satisfy a user’s need paves way to several security threats. This is tackled by securing the data available in the borrowed resource. Data Security is provided using the traditional Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm. The traversal vulnerability issue poses a threat to security. This is handled in this work thereby, protecting every virtual machine (instance) created in the cloud from access by other malicious instances available in the same cloud. Security is evaluated based on cost. The results show that a secure cloud is designed. © Springer India 2015.