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1.8 CHALLENGES AND RISKS

Despite the initial success and popularity of the cloud computing paradigm and the extensive availability of providers and tools, a significant number of challenges and risks are inherent to this new model of computing. Providers, developers, and end users must consider these challenges and risks to take good advantage of cloud computing. 

Issues to be faced include user privacy, data security, data lock-in, availability of service, disaster recovery, performance, scalability, energy-efficiency, and programmability.

1.8.1 Security, Privacy, and Trust

The information security as a main issue: “current cloud offerings are essentially public ... exposing the system to more attacks.” For this reason there are potentially additional challenges to make cloud computing environments as secure as in-house IT systems. At the same time, existing, well understood technologies can be leveraged, such as data encryption, VLANs, and firewalls. Security and privacy affect the entire cloud computing stack, since there is a massive use of third-party services and infrastructures that are used to host important data or to perform critical operations. 

In this scenario, the trust toward providers is fundamental to ensure the desired level of privacy for applications hosted in the cloud.

Legal and regulatory issues also need attention. When data are moved into the Cloud, providers may choose to locate them anywhere on the planet. The physical location of data centers determines the set of laws that can be applied to the management of data. For example, specific cryptography techniques could not be used because they are not allowed in some countries. Similarly, country laws can impose that sensitive data, such as patient health records, are to be stored within national borders.

1.8.2 Data Lock-In and Standardization

A major concern of cloud computing users is about having their data locked-in by a certain provider. Users may want to move data and applications out from a provider that does not meet their requirements. However, in their current form, cloud computing infrastructures and platforms do not employ standard methods of storing user data and applications. 

Consequently, they do not interoperate and user data are not portable. The answer to this concern is standardization. In this direction, there are efforts to create open standards for cloud computing. 

The Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF) was formed by organizations such as Intel, Sun, and Cisco in order to “enable a global cloud computing ecosystem whereby organizations are able to seamlessly work together for the purposes for wider industry adoption of cloud computing technology.” The development of the Unified Cloud Interface (UCI) by CCIF aims at creating a standard programmatic point of access to an entire cloud infrastructure.

In the hardware virtualization sphere, the Open Virtual Format (OVF) aims at facilitating packing and distribution of software to be run on VMs so that virtual appliances can be made portable—that is, seamlessly run on hypervisor of different vendors.

1.8.3 Availability, Fault-Tolerance, and Disaster Recovery

It is expected that users will have certain expectations about the service level to be provided once their applications are moved to the cloud. These expectations include availability of the service, its overall performance, and what measures are to be taken when something goes wrong in the system or its components. 

In summary, users seek for a warranty before they can comfortably move their business to the cloud.

SLAs, which include QoS requirements, must be ideally set up between customers and cloud computing providers to act as warranty. An SLA specifies the details of the service to be provided, including availability and performance guarantees. Additionally, metrics must be agreed upon by all parties, and penalties for violating the expectations must also be approved.

1.8.4 Resource Management and Energy-Efficiency

One important challenge faced by providers of cloud computing services is the efficient management of virtualized resource pools. Physical resources such as CPU cores, disk space, and network bandwidth must be sliced and shared among virtual machines running potentially heterogeneous workloads.

The multi-dimensional nature of virtual machines complicates the activity of finding a good mapping of VMs onto available physical hosts while maximizing user utility. Dimensions to be considered include: number of CPUs, amount of memory, size of virtual disks, and network bandwidth. Dynamic VM mapping policies may leverage the ability to suspend, migrate, and resume VMs as an easy way of preempting low-priority allocations in favor of higher-priority ones. Migration of VMs also brings additional challenges such as detecting when to initiate a migration, which VM to migrate, and where to migrate. In addition, policies may take advantage of live migration of virtual machines to relocate data center load without significantly disrupting running services. 

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