Cloud Research
Green Cloud Computing and Cyber Security
Because of the growing interest in cloud computing, there is an increased need for energy-efficient solutions to minimize its effects on the environment. Green cloud computing is important because it offers potential solutions to help reduce energy consumption and operational costs. One solution is the use of nano data centers which uses ISP controlled home gateways to offer computing and storage services. Another solution is virtualization, a technique that shares a single physical instance of a resource with multiple customers at once. This solution promotes machine management and energy efficiency. Green cloud computing relates to the material we learned in MIS3406 because it incorporates environmentally sustainable solutions to cloud services such as AWS as a result of companies moving away from physical data centers. Some companies value sustainability and aim to reduce their carbon footprint, and these solutions help to minimize their impact on the environment.
Since your information is not being stored locally and instead being managed by a trusted third party, this can cause security threats in the cloud. Because these services are provided through the internet and utilize many different technologies, new security issues can arise at any given moment due to cyber attacks. If businesses are entrusting their private information to a third party, they want to make sure that there are security measures put in place. In MIS3406, we learned that our virtual private cloud has a public and private subnet. The public subnet is used for applications and web pages that we want people to publicly access, and our private subnet hosts more secure applications such as our database servers that we do not want people to access. The private subnet is never connected to the internet, and instead uses the NAT gateway to communicate with public subnets.
Green cloud computing and cloud security are tied together because without security measures put in place, green cloud computing solutions would not be feasible since businesses would not want to risk their information being compromised. For example, virtualization is one of the solutions presented by green cloud computing. However, there are numerous security issues that come with this method such as system and application vulnerabilities, malicious insiders, shared technology issues, and account hijacking. Green cloud computing and cloud security must work hand in hand to deliver a service that is both secure and environmentally sustainable.
One case study discusses an employee from IBM who went to South Africa on an international assignment. A large cell phone company faced numerous issues revolving around test environment resource availability and test server waste due to lack of governance and management. They also did not have a good scheduling process for shared resources. A private cloud was proposed to help manage the company’s virtualized test environments. With this solution, the company’s IT landscape increased in size and complexity and they ended up managing over 1,100 instances. They focused on maintaining infrastructures instead of adding new equipment, and had an average of 12.97% CPU usage across platforms. They reduced test server waste because a better system to manage and govern over the resources was put into place. There were initial worries about cloud security because of how much customers and information the company manages, but the private cloud was installed at the customer’s data center which eliminated concerns. This story demonstrates how companies are more inclined to switch to green cloud computing if they know that the server is protected and secured.
References
Singh, K. Chatterjee, “Cloud security issues and challenges: A survey, Journal of Network and Computer Applications”, Volume 79, 2017, Pages 88-115, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2016.11.027.
BigData. “Green Cloud Computing – The Sustainable Way to Use the Cloud.” Big Data Analytics News, 26 July 2019, bigdataanalyticsnews.com/green-cloud-computing-sustainable-use/.
Baliga, R. W. A. Ayre, K. Hinton and R. S. Tucker, “Green Cloud Computing: Balancing Energy in Processing, Storage, and Transport,” in Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 99, no. 1, pp. 149-167, Jan. 2011, doi: 10.1109/JPROC.2010.2060451.
J. Lamb, “Green IT and use of private cloud computing in South Africa,” 2011 8th International Conference & Expo on Emerging Technologies for a Smarter World, New York, NY, 2011, pp. 1-6, doi: 10.1109/CEWIT.2011.6135875.