<a href="http://youthedesigner.com/contest/"><img src="http://www.youthedesigner.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/graphicdesign-survey.jpg" width="250" height="250" border="0" /></a>

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students in projects and other related courses, additionally to traditional programming languages:

LAMP
• Oracle Express Edition (XE) and Oracle Application Express
(APEX)
• Oracle Designer, Oracle Java Developer, Oracle SQL
Developer
• Oracle Server Standard and Enterprise Editions (10g and 11g)
• Oracle Real Application Cluster
• Eclipse, CentOS and Fedora Linux
• VMware virtualization by utilizing ESX Vmware, Vmware
Server, VMware Control Center, VMware Fusion for MAC
OS X Leopard, VMware Workstations for Windows and
Linux
• IBM Rational Software Architect, IBM RequisitePro, IBM
Rational Rose Enterprise
• CVSNT, SVN and GitHub version control systems, as well as

• free OpenProj, DotProject, PHProjekt additionally to
proprietary MS Project management tool.

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Top 10 Free Cloud Applications for Web Designers

1. GridFox

GridFox is a free add-on to Firefox allowing you to show grids on your currently viewed page on Firefox to check the layout and composition of the page.

2. Pixlr

Pixlr is free and feature-rich, Photoshop-like image editor allowing you to edit image from your web browser with no installation required.

3. Draftboard

Draftboard is a free collaboration tool for web designers and their clients to monitor the development of a particular website, and collaborate on the design elements, etc. in real time.

4. CSS Sandbox

CSS Sandbox is a free web tool allowing you to tinker with CSS configurations on the fly – no coding involved.

5. Snipplr

Want to save and share your codes and work on your web design project quickly? Just go to Snipplr. The free web app allows you to store and share your code snippets, so that you can copy-and-paste them into your future project.

6. Golden Ratio Calculator

Golden Ratio Calculator is a free app helping you to find the best width of your website, so that yours follow with the Golden Ratio principles. Just type in a number and you will get the recommended width of a particular section of your website.

7. Adobe Kuler

Adobe Kuler is a free Flash-based app helping you to pick the best color schemes for your website. There is an active community that can recommend you some great color schemes.

8. Typetester

Typetester is a free web tool to help you looking for the right typography for your website: Font size, typeface and more – by comparing 3 paragraphs on which you can edit the way you like it.

9. Browsershots

Want to check how your designed website looks in various web browsers? Try Browsershots – a free tool that takes snapshots of your web address from various browsers and OS.

10. Dropbox

Dropbox is a cloud storage allowing you to store your design files on the cloud. An excellent way to backup your work. It is free for the basic plan (more than enough space, in my opinion.)

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Top 7 Apps for Staying Productive in the Cloud

These are some of my most essential applications for staying productive in the cloud.

Google Docs

I’ve slowly moved to using Google Docs as my primary document creation and storage platform. With the recent Docs update came a slew of new, useful features and enhancements, many of which enabled me to take the plunge to using it as my primary document platform.

Google Calendar

I now use Google Calendar to schedule all of my meetings and appointments. It even syncs with my iPhone (including push notifications for upcoming meetings), so I always have access.

Gmail

Gmail is my productivity center. All of my e-mail addresses filter into a single inbox, with intelligent filtering and categorizing for easy organization. Gmail’s recent Priority Inbox update means it’s also become my defacto to-do list.

Dropbox

Dropbox serves as my virtual hard drive (as it’s meant to), and allows me to access important files on any computer I use. Dropbox features a desktop app, web app and iPhone app.

Evernote

As I’m fond of telling friends and colleagues, Evernote augments my brain. Evernote is a desktop / web / mobile app that allows me to save notes, pictures, website and other information into a single collection point. Evernote also features a series of browser plugins so you can save important web pages (i.e. – that study on Facebook users) to your notebook.

Flickr

With Flickr’s pro account, I’m able to upload an unlimited number of photos at full quality, as well as re-download them again later. Given the number of hard drive crashes I’ve experience in my lifetime, it’s great to know that my photos are safe, secure, and accessible from anywhere.

HootSuite

HootSuite is my Social Media dashboard. I’m able to access and manage my Twitter and Facebook accounts, as well as a slew of other social networks from one interface. HootSuite is primarily a web based application, with several flavors of mobile apps as well.

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Top 10 Cloud Applications for Small Business

Google Apps for Business: Google is the household name, and it has all needed to offer a reliable and secure online office tools – even before the cloud is as popular as today – Google Docs, Google Calendar, Gmail, etc. – you can access all of them in a secure and private environment with 24/7 support. The “personal” version is free, while the business version is offered at $50 per user per year.

Skype: Forget the latest historic downtime – Skype is one of the most trusted and reliable cloud-based companies offering free Internet call, with Pay As You Go and subscription-based plans to call on any phones to meet your small business needs.

SalesForce: A household name in cloud computing for customer relationship management (CRM.) Also one of the front-runners in the cloud, SalesForce is growing its arsenal of cloud apps: Sales Cloud, Force.com, Service Cloud, and the latest, Database.com. SalesForce can help your small business to manage everything related to your sales-generating activities in a centralised “dashboard.”

Basecamp: One of the leaders in online collaboration and project management. It can help your stakeholders to discuss, update, upload/download, share – anything you can think of – in one single web account, in real time. Basecamp claims that there are over 5 million people worldwide who are using it.

Quickbase: This online database software can help your small business tech team to create online database application from scratch or use more than 200 templates. Don’t have someone to build database app, yet? Intuit’s Quickbase can recommend you one of 160 partners to help you out.

Box.net: A cloud storage service provider allowing you to share, manage and access files and folders online in a secured and private environment. You can also collaborate to update documents on the fly with your business team members or clients.

Outright: If you are like me, you’ll gonna like this cloud finance app – Outright will help you with your business accounting by allowing you to track income/expenses, tax obligations, and profits/losses in real time, online. No more hiring/firing bookkeeper for your business finances.

Evernote: I call Evernote a “cloud reminder” or “cloud scratchpad” if you will, simply because of what it does best – it helps you to store your ideas, notes, reminders, schedules, to-dos, audios, images, videos, etc. for you to recall and review later on.

Mozy: The industry leader for online backup of any kind of data and information – images, documents, audios, etc. You can use Mozy cloud app to back up your entire business, regardless of your business’ size. With Mozy, you are not location-constrained – you can backup and access your backup remotely.

SiteCloud: Cloud hosting is great to host your small business website because it’s on-demand and scalable – in real time. You are guaranteed service availability due to the nature of the cloud – no issues regarding a sudden surge of web traffic to your site. You can switch plan anytime you want, without service interruption.

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The Go programming language.Language of cloud computing

The Go programming language is an open source project to make programmers more productive. Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.


http://golang.org/

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A good collection of cloud

http://www.trusted-cloud.com/publisher/57/cloud-computing-journal/

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Do you want your organisation with Cloud OS?

Try eyeOS,

Easy to install just need Apache server with php5.2.

Can be install of on your local system or in your web server.

click the link below to get the OS.

http://www.eyeos.org/downloads/download-1-x-version/

See the manual how to install.

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Free web-based Virtual Computer for every human being. Cloud OS

I have came across with some free service of cloud.

click the link below and enjoy the free service of cloud computing.

It's amazing to be in cloud.

http://www.icloud.com

http://www.eyeos.org/what-is-eyeos/try-eyeos-now/

In above link eyeos, you got two option..

http://beta.cloudo.com/

Find me at ajithex.

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Find White papers

http://www.findwhitepapers.com/technology/networking/cloud_computing

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www.janakiramm.net

http://www.janakiramm.net/blog/category/cloud-computing

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Cloud Computing

Good Collection of research paper
http://www.infosys.com/research/publications/setlabs-briefings/Pages/cloud-computing.aspx

http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~ashishpardhi/Papers/Cloud_computing/05431874.pdf

http://www.omg.org/news/meetings/tc/dc/special-events/Cloud_Computing/Federal_Open_Cloud_Computing_Initiative-FOCI.pdf

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cloud Computing-learn it

Introduction to cloud computing

http://www.thinkgrid.com/docs/computing-whitepaper.pdf

 Saving Money Through Cloud Computing

http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/papers/2010/0407_cloud_computing_west/0407_cloud_computing_west.pdf

Cloud Storage for Cloud Computing

http://www.snia.org/cloud/CloudStorageForCloudComputing.pdf

Cloud computing A collection of working papers

http://www.johnhagel.com/cloudperspectives.pdf

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Cloud computing in defence

http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/defense-cloud-computing-06387/

http://www.artofdefence.com/dokumente/Cloud_AppSec_Whitepaper.pdf

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Some White Papers-collection

http://www.findwhitepapers.com/technology/networking/cloud_computing

http://www.weblab.isti.cnr.it/research/

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Cloud computing: topic

IT Infrastructure and Services Maturity achieved through Cloud Computing - mapping with Zachman's Model, GERA and COBIT

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What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud Computing is a marketing buzz-word that got accepted as definition of services built on top of hardware capacities: computing, storage and network.

• Services are provided on-demand; without the need of up-front investments into a datacenter.
• Hardware management is abstracted from the customers.
• Infrastructure capacities are elastic and can easily scale up and down.

Cloud Computing Services can be grouped into three broad categories:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), where customer gets raw hardware resources: virtual machines, cloud storage space, networking capabilities.
• Platform as a Service (PaaS), where service provider builds a platform to simplify solving some technological tasks. This simplifies life for the customer, but also comes with a lock-down cost.
• Software as a Service (SaaS). At this level everything is way simpler for the customers to consume, since they are provided with actual services generating business value to them. Service providers handle all the technological complexity and provide the support as needed.

Infrastructure as a Service Providers

• Amazon Web Services - scalable Xen-based virtual machines available on per-hour bases. They also have S3 Storage offer.
• Rackspace Cloud Servers and Files – Xen based virtual machines available per-hour.

Platform as a Service Providers

• Microsoft Windows Azure - .NET driven and Microsoft-owned cloud infrastructure.
• Google App Engine - Python-based cloud framework.
• Heroku – Popular Cloud Platform for Ruby-on-Rails. Known for simplicity and ease of use.

Software as a Service Providers

• Windows Live Mesh
• Lokad Forecasting Services – Scalable online business intelligence and sales forecasting.
• Salesforce.com

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Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing: This is evolving as a service facilitating IT resources on demand by virtue of applications and business services hosted on Virtual IT
Infrastructures. Many OEMs have already launched cloud computing services to corporations across the world - like IBM Blue Cloud, Google Apps Cloud,
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Microsoft Cloud, etc. These service providers claim that the customers can get any IT resource on demand - storage
capacity, memory, network bandwidth, application license, etc. The market is developed to such an extent that millions of customers are already availing
these services. The students have mammoth opportunities to study the benefits of cloud computing to businesses across the world. A large number of case
studies is possible because the concept has gained popularity across the globe. It needs to be investigated if the current virtualisation service providers on IT
infrastructure clouds are fully ready to undertake the responsibility of running mission critical businesses (like banks, financial services, trading and
investments, etc.) the way they have been running reliably in traditional data centres. It will be quite interesting for the students to conduct interviews with
professionals that have already hosted their services on virtual servers. The attributes to be investigated are: Reliability, Uptime, Speed and Performance,
Elasticity (resources on demand), Billing, Information Systems Strategy, IT Strategy, Information Security, IT Governance, IT Services (to end users), etc.

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Rinat Abdullin on efficient software development, cloud computing and CQRS

http://abdullin.com/

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How Can Cloud Computing Help In Education?

How Can Cloud Computing Help In Education?

“Education is not the filling a bucket but the lighting of a fire.”
- William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet, dramatist.

Whenever we talk of cloud computing, we always talk about its impact on business. In all my previous articles, I have done the same, speaking about how cloud computing can improve efficiencies, cut costs, save time and in general, give businesses a great return on investment. However, today I am going to speak on something quite different – how cloud computing can help in the noblest human pursuit of all, education.
The worth of human society is not in how much it earns but how much it knows. For it is knowledge that drives advancement, and ultimately, human comfort. And is not comfort the ultimate aim of increased earnings? However, the worth of knowledge goes far beyond the limitations of material wealth. It is knowledge that makes man, Man.
That being said, I believe that cloud computing has a prominent role to play in the classrooms of tomorrow. Let me provide a few examples. Many of our nation’s schools suffer from low graduation rates directly attributable to insufficient infrastructure – shorthanded staff, tiny classrooms, lack of teachers. Cloud computing solutions can solve many of these problems.
For support staff, a distributed management system can substantially reduce their load, leveraging efficiencies across the nationwide or statewide school network. The problem of tiny classrooms can be surmounted through virtual classrooms, with students attending class in their own homes on their own computers, with the teacher being present hundreds, even thousands of miles away. This can also help address the issue of inadequate number of teachers. With computers getting cheaper by the day, this does not seem unfeasible. And why stop only in America? With cloud-based education tools, the whole world can learn from the best.
Now that we have explored possibilities for the future, why don’t we take a look at the present? Many schools in the United States already enjoy the benefits of computer-based learning; how can cloud computing improve the process? Well, for one, maintenance and upgrades will become a whole lot easier. The service provider will take care of all the nitty-gritty, leaving schools free to devote resources towards what they do best – teach our children.
Also, think how convenient homework assignments will become. The students can work on the cloud, cooperate with team members and share knowledge, and be sure that they won’t leave behind their homework assignments when they go to school. Since they are on the cloud, they can access them anywhere, be it home or school.
From schools, let’s move to colleges. Many colleges do not have sufficient hardware or software to give students a complete learning experience. This problem is especially pronounced in the technical fields. However, with SaaS and IaaS, a limited budget will still allow students access to the latest technologies on offer. Simulating those complex weather patterns and running those complicated algorithms will no longer be something that only students at the top-of-the institutions like Stanford and MIT can do. In other words, cloud computing can democratize education.
Some countries are already moving in this direction. Earlier this month, the Higher Education Funding Council for England announced a plan to allocate £12.5 million to a new program that will fund shared services in cloud computing at colleges and universities across the country.
Sarah Underwood, magazine and brand editor of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) for Education, said, “Some of those schools and academies are already working groups and have shared managed services, and those managed services could very easily be put in the cloud. It saves them from downtime, maintenance, upgrades, it has shared costs and they don’t have to run it for themselves.”
Ms. Underwood believes this represents a great opportunity for ICT professionals to promote cloud computing in general. “You need ICT people who are going to champion it – people still have quite a lot of questions about security, data security in particular. Some will embrace something like that and some people will find that quite a difficult concept to work with,” she opined.
By Sourya Biswas

Source: http://www.cloudtweaks.com/2011/02/how-can-cloud-computing-help-in-education/

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How cloud computing is helping SMBs

NEW DELHI: Like most technology jargons, cloud computing is best explained through users. For small businesses, cloud computing offers an opportunity to use sophisticated solutions like enterprise resource planning at less than half the cost by avoiding upfront investments in buying software licences and any computer hardware.

ET spoke to over dozen users of cloud computing solutions and selected a few from the industrial clusters of Tirupur and Peenya (near Bangalore) to see whether this cloud can really rain benefits.

Now, functioning becomes easier: PS Nair, MD, ETA Technologies

When ETA Technologies decided to implement an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software two years back, it was the beginning of a transformation. Along with a few other companies, which formed the Bangalore Machine Tool Manufacturing Network , ETA Technologies paid Rs 2 lakh and installed a cloud based ERP software to make functioning easier.

For ETA, it simplified the process of judging quality parameters, quantifying wastage and taking action based on reports generated. Item delays, reason for delays, costing and tracking items became simpler post ERP implementation. "From a customer service standpoint, we have a ready-reckoner of complaints on which the top manage-ment can work on," says Nair, managing director, ETA Technologies.

"We are also able to check quality parameters and follow-up with suppliers. We have a record of items that get delayed and the reasons why they get delayed. On the manufacturing side, it was very difficult to keep track of each item that goes into a machine we build. But now, each item is segregated and is easier to handle costing," he points out. ETA Technologies makes special purpose machines, electrical upsetting machines, assembly machines and test rigs for auto components.

Linking up for customisation: Indradev Babu, MD, Uday Computer-Aided Manufacturing
Indradev Babu, head of Uday Computer Aided Manufacturing , had been hearing of cloud-based ERP solutions — and their positives — for a while when he got in touch with an employee of a software major. The engineer sold him the idea that two or three companies could join hands and implement a cloud-linked solution for small businesses.

Soon, the company got together with two other firms located in Mysore and Bangalore, negotiated with the vendor and implemented a custom-built solution.

Though there were hurdles in the beginning, the system's functioning improved over time. "We have been hearing how wonderful a tool ERP solutions are. Then we started talking to different people and found that small systems — created locally -- were not really configurable and can sometimes fail. We wanted to go for a proven system," said Indradev.

"Introduction of the system was chaotic in the beginning. Though we had some trouble initially, it is up and running now. Our business processes became more streamlined," he said. The expense on the solution was Rs 35 lakh shared among the three, he added. While only some functions of the system are being used right now, it has plans to improve functionality in the future.

Tracking at the click of mouse: Fenwick Thomas, Partner, Fenwick & Ravi
For the two-decade-old manufacturer — Fenwick and Ravi — tracking orders and managing thousands of parts that go into a machine was becoming a problem. Roughly two years back, the company -- which makes machine tools as well as special purpose machines — moved to cloud-based hosted ERP solutions and things have changed a lot since then.

"Earlier, tracking orders and maintaining records was a problem. With ERP, all information is now available online. We are now trying to go to the process level with the cloud-based solution. That way, it will be a complete solution. Also, addressing customer complaints becomes easier as the management can directly access records," said Fenwick Thomas, partner, Fenwick and Ravi.

The company uses an ERP product called developed by a Bangalore-based company to generate purchase orders based on requirements, handle dispatch and other functions including generation of the final invoice.

"We introduced the software two- and-half years back. It is not very expensive compared to its wide range of use and costs less than Rs 3 lakh," says Fenwick. The export-oriented firm also gets feedback from its overseas customers online since users can log in to the service network and report problems.

Moving to cloud to trim costs: Sanjay Gupta, CEO, E-Readiness Centre, Tirupur
After months of evaluating different ERP solutions from top global vendors including SAP and Microsoft , and forming a special purpose vehicle called G Tech Solutions , the exporters in Tirupur led by Sanjay Gupta have finally decided to go with a home- grown business software. Tirupur's exporters will customise the solution and manage the data centre, which will host the application.

To avoid high software licensing and maintenance costs, the application is going to be delivered using 'cloud computing' model that allows users to avoid these costs and access services related to human resources, procurement and inventory by paying a monthly subscription fee.

"We are putting everything in the cloud," says Sanjay Gupta, CEO of the e-readiness centre (ERC) at Tirupur, an organisation that helps exporters leverage technology. "We now plan to have a centralised ERP that can be delivered to exporters for monthly fee of Rs 3,000-4,000 without having to invest upfront," he says.

By paying a one-time fee of Rs 10,000 and Rs 3,200-3,500 monthly subscription for each user, exporters will be able to access complex business applications that automate their processes of order monitoring, inventory management with ease.

Indeed, while evaluating similar software from other vendors including SAP and Microsoft, exporters realised that per user subscription was too high. In some solutions the per month per user fee was as high as Rs 9,000.

These exporters are hoping that an ERP software will help them track export consignments in a real-time manner through computers and even mobile phones, helping them erase almost Rs 800 crore in losses each year because of delayed shipments, apart from saving another 200-300 crore from supply chain efficiencies. Exporters from Tirupur have to incur extra air shipment charges, that are over six times cost-lier than shipments sent through sea route.

With this software, almost 4,000 small and medium exporters can save Rs 1,000 crore and compete more effectively with rivals Bangladesh and China.

A must-have IT solution: Shiva Shankaraiah, MD, Trishul Machine Tools
Shiva Shankaraiah left a bigger company to start his own specialised machine manufacturing unit. One of the many things he learned at the bigger company he worked for was the use of ERP to streamline operations. For Shiva Shankaraiah, ERP was a must-have in his own company, which makes specialised machines exported to the US, the UK, Turkey and Germany.

Right from acceptance of order to planning, purchase, dispatch, costing and finally getting customer feedback, the ERP solution has helped, says Shankaraiah.

"We don't use ERP for accounts and salaries as yet because the applications seem to be a little more complex. For that we use solutions from Tally. For everything else, the custom-made ERP works fine," said Shiva. "For accounting, we use Tally because it takes care of all statutory compliance requirements," he added. He is now planning to invest Rs 4.5 lakh to buy a more advanced – and cloud-based -- ERP solution that provides a higher degree of efficiency.

"The custom software cost us about Rs 60,000 five years back. It has been very useful but it is difficult to quantify the exact financial implication. We plan to upgrade to a cloud-based ERP solution," he added.

Read more: How cloud computing is helping SMBs - The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/enterprise-it/services-apps/How-cloud-computing-is-helping-SMBs/articleshow/7549039.cms#ixzz1Em4Fgtsw


source:http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/enterprise-it/services-apps/How-cloud-computing-is-helping-SMBs/articleshow/7549039.cms

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New link

http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/resources/Public-cloud-computing-services

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Virtualization

Virtualization, in computing, is the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, such as a hardware platform, operating system, a storage device or network resources.

Virtualization can be viewed as part of an overall trend in enterprise IT that includes autonomic computing, a scenario in which the IT environment will be able to manage itself based on perceived activity, and utility computing, in which computer processing power is seen as a utility that clients can pay for only as needed. The usual goal of virtualization is to centralize administrative tasks while improving scalability and work loads.

ypes of virtualization

Hardware

Main article: Hardware virtualization

Hardware virtualization or platform virtualization refers to the creation of a virtual machines that acts like a real computer with an operating system. Software executed on these virtual machines are separated from the underlying hardware resources. For example, a computer that is running Microsoft Windows may host a virtual machine that looks like a computer with Mac OS X operating system. Subsequently, Mac OS X-based software can be run on that virtual machine.

In hardware virtualization, the term host machine refers to the actual machine on which the virtualization takes place; the term guest machine, however, refers to the virtual machine. Likewise, the adjectives host and guest are used to help distinguish the software that run on the actual machine from those that run on the virtual machine. The software or firmware that creates a virtual machine on the host hardware is called Hypervisor or Virtual Machine Monitor.

Different types of hardware virtualization include:

1. Full virtualization: Almost complete simulation of the actual hardware to allow software, typically a guest operating system, to run unmodified
2. Partial virtualization: Some but not all of the target environment is simulated. Some guest software, therefore, may need modifications to run in this virtual environment.
3. Paravirtualization: A hardware environment is not simulated; however, the guest software are executed in their own isolated domains, as if they are running on a separate system. Guest software need to be specifically modified to run in this environment.

Hardware-assisted virtualization is a way of improving the efficiency of hardware virtualization. It involves employing specially-designed CPUsand hardware components that help improve the performance of a guest environment.

Hardware virtualization must not be mistaken with hardware emulation: In hardware emulation, a piece of hardware imitates another, while in hardware virtualization, a hypervisor (a piece of software) imitates a computer hardware. Furthermore, a hypervisor must not be mistaken with an emulator. These two are defined similarly: Both are computer programs that imitate hardware. However, their domain of use in language differs.

See also: Mobile Virtualization

[edit]Software

• Operating system-level virtualization, hosting of multiple virtualized environments within a single OS instance
• Application virtualization and Workspace virtualization, the hosting of individual applications in an environment separated from the underlying OS

Memory

• Memory virtualization, aggregating RAM resources from networked systems into a single memory pool
• Virtual memory, giving an application program the impression that it has contiguous working memory, isolating it from the underlying physical memory implementation

Storage

• Storage virtualization, the process of completely abstracting logical storage from physical storage
• Distributed file system

Data

• Data virtualization, the presentation of data as an abstract layer, independent of underlying database systems, structures and storage
• Database virtualization, the decoupling of the database layer, which lies between the storage and application layers within the application stack

Network

• Desktop virtualization, the remote display, hosting or manipulation of a graphical computer environment (desktop)
• Network virtualization, creation of a virtualized network addressing space within or across network subnets

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtualization

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Cloud Computing Technology Series

Cloud Storage: Latest Trends and Technologies and Opportunities for Deployment in the Enterprise

This evening event is part of IBF Media's Technology Series on Cloud Computing.

An eminent panel will focus on trends and technologies in cloud storage and discuss how organizations have effectively deployed cloud storage technologies in their organizations, and how SMB organizations can effectively take advantage of the cloud for storage.
Cloud storage is a model of networked online storage where data is stored on multiple virtual servers, generally hosted by third parties, rather than being hosted on dedicated servers.

Hosting companies operate large data centers; and people who require their data to be hosted, buy or lease storage capacity from them, using it for their own storage needs.

The data center operators, in the background, virtualize the resources according to the requirements of the customer , exposing them as storage pools, for customers to proprietary files or data objects.

Physically, the resource may span across multiple servers. Cloud storage services may be accessed through a web service application programming interface (API), or through a Web-based user interface.
• Companies need only pay for the storage they actually use.

• Companies do not need to install physical storage devices in their own datacenter or offices, which reduces IT and hosting costs.

• maintenance tasks, such as backup, data replication, and purchasing additional storage devices are offloaded to the responsibility of a service provider, allowing organizations to focus on their core business.

• Security of stored data and data in transit may be a concern when storing sensitive data at a cloud storage provider

• Performance may be lower than local storage.

• Reliability and availability depends on wide area network availability and on the level of precautions taken by the service provide

http://www.ibfmedia.com/cc20110224.php 

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Microsoft Research will digitise heritage sites in 3D images

P Anandan, a computer vision imagery scientist and founder MD of Microsoft Research India, feels that India’s image as an IT services hub will soon metamorphose into that of a R&D powerhouse. He spoke to DNA about the mission and challenges ahead of Microsoft Research in India. Excerpts:

Is it just for talent that you have set a R&D centre here for or is it that India itself throws unique problems because research does not exist in vacuum?
The answer is both. For research to succeed you have to have talent. It’s also a motivational factor working with best scientists and talent. Secondly, being in India draws our attention to some of the problems which you would miss elsewhere.
Just to differentiate, my lab only does research and no development. We have 60 people. The India Development Centre in Hyderabad has 1,500. Most of our staff are PhDs. By the time you get a PhD, you probably forget how to write good programmes. We work with our partners in Hyderabad and the US to do development, but we don’t do development ourselves.
Example of some of the Indian problem based research you undertook…
Interestingly, you will find that they may not be specific to India but were motivated from India. For example, most of the times the road traffic in India is a nightmare. Our researchers came up with an idea to monitor traffic in Bangalore. We thought how we can create an infrastructure that allows information from different cellphones and then analyse and based on that we can detect where the traffic is. And maybe we can provide that information to people who will be the pre-informed about the condition of their respective routes. For instance, if a cellphone is not moving for sometime it may be stuck in a traffic block and so on. Or if you hear lot of honking and noise then you may assume traffic blockage etc. So, information is there.
How does research evaluation happens in Microsoft?
When I evaluate my researchers at the end of a year I ask, well what have you done, well I have presented four papers in this conference and one of them has got best paper prize and my work is used in a course in MIT. That’s good. Then if someone says I tried publishing six papers and got zero acceptance or has got one acceptance and even the one that has been accepted is not of good quality then I realise this researcher is not doing well. So, we really expect them to prove themselves in the research community. In order to do it they will work on problems that research community feels is relevant and lead the community on the problem. That’s where the motivation comes.
Innovation is meaningless if it does not reach its user…
That process may take a long time. You don’t evaluate it in a short period of time of say anything from one month to ten years. For example, when I was working in the US lab I had worked on a technology to take images and then creating 3D models on it..3D just from two images. This was going on from 1995 to 2000. Our group was the pioneer in the world in that work. At that time Microsoft was not too interested in 3D imagery. So it was just sitting there. But just four years ago the Bing Maps team decided on 3D reconstructions of buildings and scenes of the world. So, they created a product called Photosynth. You can take your picture and it will give you a 3D imagery of the picture. So, it sat for six years without any commercialisation. But when the management thought about something like that it was readily available.
How does your research output get assimilated in products?
We have a special group called advanced development and prototyping. Their charter is to constantly listen to the product groups and our researchers for opportunities for interaction.
Which are some of the research areas you work on?
We have seven research areas. First is algorithm research. One of the reason we chose that as our research area is because worldwide algorithm is where Indian researchers are extremely good. We have a group which is working on multilingual systems.
What is the next step in multilingual research?
Ultimate goal is as a user you should be able to communicate with the machine in your own language.Trust me we are not anywhere near that.Another area we are working on is rigorous software engineering. We write many software programmes. We encounter with so many bugs. Similarly there are millions of programmes that might have encountered similar bugs.
However, every time a bug appears it comes up as something new. This is not documented properly. So, we are developing data mining techniques to address that. We would develop tools that help programmers debug. We would analyse the code automatically and would be able to say that here is the area in the programme which is not doing the right thing. We have a research group on cloud computing. We have a group called mobility networking systems that is looking at efficiency in mobile computing. We have a group working on technology for emerging markets.
Will you add more areas of research?
Yes, its fluid. For example, vision graphics is the latest addition. Tomorrow a researcher may say I am not interested in mobility I want to research into a new area. If the researcher is good and convinces us that he can attract other good researchers we go ahead. And if in an area we see only few are interested to research we would close that research.
How is your lab evaluated internally?
Our lab is evaluated on its productivity. On criteria such as are we recognised worldwide? Do our peers, say in MIT, Stanford and others, think that this lab is doing important work? When we came five years ago the number of computer science PhDs India was producing a year was just 35. And the quality was not that good.
IITs and other places were struggling to hire faculty. Because most people did not believe India was a good place to do computer science research. We were working with academic partners right from the beginning trying to evangelise the idea of more computer science PhDs. We gave PhD fellowships, travel grants to students, because only when you travel to international research conferences you are exposed to ways of doing research.
The other thing we are doing is using research community to work on projects of social importance. We are doing a project called India Digital Heritage project. We did a demo on how 3D technology can be used to capture heritage sites and tell narratives. The government’s department of science and technology (DST) got interested in this. Today we are looking at a national project to be funded by the DST involving about a dozen researchers from across the country.


Published: Thursday, Mar 11, 2010, 2:01 IST
By Amit Tripathi | Place: Mumbai | Agency: DNA 

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New Link of Cloud Computing

http://cloudcomputing.blogspot.com/

http://www.cloudtweaks.com/

http://www.azurejournal.com/

http://www-07.ibm.com/in/ibm/cloud/?ca=googleaw&gclid=CP7V67-pkacCFUQa6wodqV30sQ

http://practicalcloudcomputing.com/

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Google Office

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http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2010/EECS-2010-5.pdf

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http://weis2010.econinfosec.org/papers/session5/weis2010_schechter.pdf 
http://bingweb.binghamton.edu/~ychen/SCC2010.htm
http://energy.unimelb.edu.au/index.php?mact=CompanyDirectory,cntnt01,details,0&cntnt01detailpage=researcher-profile&cntnt01category=Smart%20Grids&cntnt01returnid=23&cntnt01cd_origpage=23&cntnt01companyid=99&cntnt01returnid=42 

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bookmark

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http://www.csoonline.com/article/663567/rsa-conference-2011-cloud-security-challenges-dominate

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http://www.cloudave.com/2404/academic-research-on-cloud-computing-gets-funded/

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-in/cloud?ocid=src-n-in-jtc-DPU-CLOUD_COMPUTING+CLOUD_COMPUTING_RESEARCH

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ACM SAC 2011 Tutorial Proposal: Cloud Computing Security: From Fundamentals to Advanced

ACM SAC 2011 Tutorial Proposal: Cloud Computing Security: From Fundamentals to Advanced Access Control
Presenters:
Dongwan Shin, Ph.D. Associate Professor Department of Computer Science and Engineering New Mexico Tech 801 Leroy Place Socorro, NM, USA 87801 doshin@nmt.edu 575-835-6459 (voice) 575-835-5587 (fax)
William Claycomb, Ph.D. Member of Technical Staff Sandia National Laboratories MS 0823, PO Box 5800 Albuquerque, NM, USA wrclayc@sandia.gov 505-284-9949 (voice) 575-284-5619 (fax)
Title: Cloud Computing Security: From Fundamentals to Advanced Access Control
Duration: Half-day (3 hours)
Abstract: Cloud computing is a paradigm rapidly being embraced as a solution for cost-savings, scalability, and collaboration. While a multitude of applications and services are available commercially for cloud-based solutions, research in this area has yet to fully embrace the full spectrum of potential challenges facing cloud computing. This tutorial aims to provide researchers with a fundamental understanding of cloud computing security, with the goals of identifying a broad range of potential research topics, and inspiring a new surge in research to address current issues. We will also discuss real implementations of research-oriented cloud computing systems, including configuration options, hardware issues, challenges, and solutions.
Motivation: Cloud computing is one of the fastest growing paradigms in applied computing. Both researchers and practitioners have a keen interest in securing cloud systems from attacks and unauthorized use. Unfortunately, cloud computing systems are quite complex, with components related to virtualization, data storage, load balancing, and administration. Each component exposes risks that could be exploited by potential attackers. A review of these fundamental risks, coupled with implementation examples, and followed by a discussion of more advanced topics such as forensics and access control will be a great benefit to those interested in learning more about cloud computing security, as well as those already researching the topic.
Target Audience: We target a broad audience, from researchers to practitioners, from academia, industry, and government. We have tailored the presentation to be of interest to those with little understanding of cloud security, as well as to those who are already researching cloud security topics.
Outline:
Section 1: Fundamentals of cloud and cloud security. (Duration: 1 hr)
Summary: Fundamentals will begin with a basic overview of cloud computing architecture and service models. Next, we will discuss current cloud computing service providers, and discuss similarities and differences among them. To compliment the academic and industrial topics, we will then discuss governmental approaches to cloud computing, such as the U.S. Government’s FedRAMP program. Finally, we will give a detailed analysis of the top threats to cloud computing, which frames the security focus of the remainder of the tutorial.
Subtopics:
o Architectures and service models
o Service providers
o Government efforts in cloud computing
o Threats to cloud computing
Relevant literature:
Cloud Security Alliance, “Top Threats to Cloud Computing V1.0”, http://www.cloudsecurityalliance.org/topthreats/csathreats.v1.0.pdf, March 2010.
“Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP)” http://www.cio.gov/pages.cfm/page/Federal-Risk-and-Authorization-Management-Program-FedRAMP
Section 2: Implementation details (Duration: 45 min)
Summary: This section will contain an actual cloud computing implementation, focusing specifically on configuration features specific to security-related concerns. Additional discussion will center on architectural differences between cloud systems implemented for different purposes. Finally, we will discuss successes and failures involved in creating a cloud system for research purposes, based on actual results from implementations at the Secure Computing Lab at New Mexico Tech, the Institute for Cyber Security at UT San Antonio, and U.S. National Laboratories.
Subtopics:
o Building a cloud system for research purposes
o Implementation challenges
o Successes and failures
Section 3: Advanced Security (Duration: 45 min)
Summary: This section builds on the foundations of the previous sections to describe advanced security topics, such as forensics and access control. Forensics is a challenging issue for cloud systems, given the exhaustive use of computing resources and distributed architecture. Access control is another key aspect, as cloud systems often host a variety of different applications for users across political as well as geographic boundaries. We conclude with a brief discussion of security issues facing cloud computing today, as well as potential security research topics for the future.
Subtopics:
o Forensics
o Injecting RBAC to IaaS
o Pressing issues facing cloud security today
Relevant literature:
Dan Lin and Anna Squicciarini, “Data Protection Models for Service Provisioning in the Cloud”, ACM SACMAT, 2010.
Thomas Ristenpart, Eran Tromer, Hovav Shacham, and Stefan Savage. “Hey, You, Get Off of My Cloud!”, ACM CCS, 2009
Expected background:
The audience should have a basic understand of the concepts of cloud computing. Based on the audience experience at the actual event, we can tailor the subject matter as necessary. However, we don’t want to exclude anyone simply because they haven’t previously studied cloud computing security. Experienced researchers can not only enhance the first two sessions, but will also benefit from the material presented in the third session, and may find opportunities for future collaboration.
Biographical sketch:
Dongwan Shin, Ph.D. Associate Professor Department of Computer Science and Engineering New Mexico Tech 801 Leroy Place Socorro, NM, USA 87801 doshin@nmt.edu
Dr. Dongwan Shin is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at New Mexico Tech. He is the founder of the Secure Computing Lab, and has over 40 publications in journals and conference proceedings. His research interests are access control, digital identity and privacy management, wireless sensor and mobile computing, and distributed and cloud computing. He received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2004.
William Claycomb, Ph.D. Member of Technical Staff Sandia National Laboratories MS 0823, PO Box 5800 Albuquerque, NM, USA wrclayc@sandia.gov
Dr. William Claycomb is a Member of Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories. His primary research interests are malware analysis and detection, distributed and cloud computing, information security, and mobile and wireless computing. Dr. Claycomb has been at Sandia since 2003, and received his Ph.D. from New Mexico Tech in 2009.
Relevant Experience:
Dr. Shin has taught both undergraduate and graduate courses in access control and cloud computing.
Additionally, Dr. Shin and Dr. Claycomb have co-chaired IEEE workshops on cloud computing applications (CloudApp 2010) and trusted collaboration (TrustCol 2009-2010). They are presenting a tutorial on cloud computing security at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ACM CCS) in October, 2010.
Publications:
Dongwan Shin and Hakan Akkan. "Domain-based Virtualized Resource Management in Cloud Computing.” TrustCol 2010, October 2010.
Victor Echeverria, Lorie M. Liebrock, and Dongwan Shin. "Permission Management System: Permission as a Service in Cloud Computing," CloudApp 2010, Seoul, South Korea, July, 2010.

http://www.acm.org/conferences/sac/sac2011/T5.pdf

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