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as reasoning, inferencing, and machine learning.
There are presently significant holes in this area.
Knowledge representation to facilitate efficient
reasoning is one of them. The current techniques
using triple stores seem simplistic for the needs
and need to evolve further. Natural Language Pro-
cessing, speech recognition and computer vision
applications can significantly improve the quality
of life. There is a need to construct frameworks
for easy and rapid development and deployment
of these applications in the cloud, just like there
are for business processes.
of fault tolerance has been sufficiently addressed
in the past, so the newer techniques can build-
up on them to scale-up to the cloud computing
level. Similarly, security assumes paramount
importance, as more and more applications and
data move to the cloud. Cisco Systems, Inc. has
unveiled a Collaboration Cloud architecture (Cisco
2010) where users are provided enterprise-level
security and privacy based on a private network
that can be used for scalable web-based collabo-
ration. Security and performance issues that are
typical of the Internet connectivity can be avoided
using this architecture. The current solutions seem
to be still inadequate to entirely secure the cloud,
particular for smaller players who cannot afford
a private network and there is plenty of scope for
research here too.
Architecture
Computer Architecture evolved extensively at
the rate given by Moore's law. The Ubiquitous
Computer architecture that is in the cloud similarly
needs to evolve substantially to meet the above
demands. The concept of viewing the cloud as a
computer is still in its infancy and there does seem
to be plenty of scope for improving its architec-
ture, just like there was scope for improving the
early Von Neumann machine. Response time is a
key driver for developments in Cloud Computing
architecture. A radical idea would be to go a few
levels down to see if a “machine language” can
be evolved for faster computation in the cloud.
Another possibility is to see if there are better
caching mechanisms to speed-up computation in
the cloud. The idea here is that so far, systems in
a datacenter have evolved individually. There is
scope for viewing the datacenter itself as a single
computing resource and exploiting its architecture
to make improvements.
Trust and Privacy
Trust is a crucial aspect to the success of Cloud
Computing. Customers have to rely heavily on
the cloud providers for the safety and integrity of
their data and applications. As can be seen from
(Durkee 2010), there are ways in which trust can
be misused. This issue has to be probed further
and solutions, more far reaching than what is
described in (Durkee 2010) need to be arrived
at. Related issue is privacy. As cloud computing
potentially crosses international borders, privacy
becomes a paramount issue. There is scope for
techno-legal research in this area and the future
cannot ignore this aspect.
CONCLUSION
Robustness and Security
In this chapter, we provided enough introduction
and pointers to the area of cloud computing. There
is plenty of jargon, hype, and reality buzzing
around in the cloud computing arena. We tried
to clarify some of the confusion and present a
concrete picture of cloud computing aspects. A
google search for “why cloud computing will
As the Ubiquitous Computer that the cloud rep-
resents grows in power and scale, there will be
increasing trends to misuse it or compromise its
security. As the criticality of applications deployed
in the cloud increases, the need for making the
infrastructure robust also increases. The problem
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