Evaluation Criteria to Run Scientific Applications in the Cloud - Cloud Computing with e-Science Applications - page 8

• Recovery and backup procedures : The user needs to evaluate the
backup procedures of the provider. All the backup tapes need to be
encrypted to maintain data confidentiality. Also, the recovery pro-
cedures need to be well documented and tested on a regular basis.
• Transfer : It is necessary that the provider implements secure data
transfer between the user and provider. Also, standard transfer
mechanisms should be provided to the user to implement in the
user's applications.
1.4.2 Administrative Concerns
Most of the administrative concerns need to be covered in the contract
between the user and the provider and need to be well described. It is neces-
sary to choose a provider with an adequate service-level agreement (SLA).
Normally, the SLA is standard for all the users, but in the case of special
needs, it is possible to negotiate with the provider. Also, the penalties if the
SLA is not correctly delivered can be added to the contract. In most cases,
changes in the standard SLA incur extra costs.
The provider must deliver a monitoring mechanism to the user to verify
system health and the capacity of its allocated resources. Reporting tools are
necessary to evaluate all the quality and usage levels.
The billing method is another important point of attention; it is necessary to
know how the provider charges the user. In many cases, the smallest unit to
charge a VM is 1 hour, even if it was used just for 5 minutes. Some providers
present costs related to data transfer to outside the cloud. The storage price
is another concern; some providers have free storage, up to a certain amount,
and others charge in different manners. All the costs incurred in the opera-
tion need to be known by the user and controlled by the provider.
The provider's business continuity is also an aspect to take into account.
This is an administrative and technical concern. In the case of the provider's
end of the business, it is necessary that the user have guaranteed access to his
or her own data. Also, the user needs the capability to move data to another
provider without much effort; this is an important interoperability aspect.
1.4.3 Performance
A typical public cloud computing environment is a hosted service available
on the Internet. The user needs to be continuously connected to the cloud
provider with the agreed speed, both for data transfer from and to the pro-
vider and for regular access to the provider's cloud manager. The Internet
connection speed and availability are an issue even for performance and
reliability with a cloud computing service.
The major issues regarding performance in cloud computing is the virtu-
alization and network interconnection. If the hypervisor does not have good