Literature Review for the Report on

Prospect of Cloud Computing in Bangladesh

K503: Management Information Systems

Prepared for
Mr. Rezwanul Haque Khan Lecturer Institute of Business Administration University of Dhaka

Prepared by
Free Riders Dewan Md. Yunus Bashar (66) Salahuddin Mahmud (84) Badiuzzaman Palash (90) Md. Mazhar Hossain (96) Md. Anwarul Karim (110) MBA 45D, Sec: B Institute of Business Administration University of Dhaka

Date: 15/04/2012

Prelude:
As an emerging economy, Bangladesh is the new Information Society Hotspot. It is investing heavily on the industrial sector as well as getting large international investments. It is time for the country to recognize the importance of using the newest versions of use of information technology. The organizations are searching for efficient and cost effective ways to manage their data resources. Some organizations have already started to use Cloud computing but the majority of this market is still untapped. Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet). Cloud computing provides computation, software applications, data access, data management and storage resources without requiring the users to know the location and other details of the computing infrastructure.

Literature review:
The objective of our research is to find out the answer of the following questions: What is the current state of cloud computing in the world and how it is being implemented? What is the prospect and what are the challenges of cloud computing? What is the prospect and what are the challenges of cloud computing in developing nations, like India? Could India be a model for Bangladesh? What is the current state of adoption of cloud computing in Bangladesh? How could Bangladesh effectively implement cloud computing and counter the challenges?

To find out the answers we are going to analyze various research papers from well known journals, company publications and seminar papers. In this literature review, the pertinent information of those papers and appropriate adoption to Bangladesh situation will be discussed.

Current State of Cloud Computing:

In developed world cloud computing is gaining gradual popularity. Watching the adoption of the technology, US National Institute of Standards and Technology has defined which service should be treated as cloud computing: Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with
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minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.1 It has also defined which Essential Characteristics and Service Models should define cloud computing: Essential Characteristics: On-demand self-service. A consumer can unilaterally provision computing capabilities, such as server time and network storage, as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with each service provider. Broad network access. Capabilities are available over the network and accessed through standard mechanisms that promote use by heterogeneous thin or thick client platforms (e.g., mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and workstations). Resource pooling. The providers computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers using a multi-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and reassigned according to consumer demand. There is a sense of location independence in that the customer generally has no control or knowledge over the exact location of the provided resources but may be able to specify location at a higher level of abstraction (e.g., country, state, or datacenter). Examples of resources include storage, processing, memory, and network bandwidth. Rapid elasticity. Capabilities can be elastically provisioned and released, in some cases automatically, to scale rapidly outward and inward commensurate with demand. To the consumer, the capabilities available for provisioning often appear to be unlimited and can be appropriated in any quantity at any time. Measured service. Cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource use by leveraging a metering capability1 at some level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service (e.g., storage, processing, bandwidth, and active user accounts). Resource usage can be monitored, controlled, and reported, providing transparency for both the provider and consumer of the utilized service.

Service Models: Software as a Service (SaaS). The capability provided to the consumer is to use the providers applications running on a cloud infrastructure2. The applications are accessible from various client devices through either a thin client interface, such as a web browser (e.g., web-based email), or a program interface. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, storage, or even individual application capabilities, with the possible exception of limited userspecific application configuration settings.
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Platform as a Service (PaaS). The capability provided to the consumer is to deploy onto the cloud infrastructure consumer-created or acquired applications created using programming languages, libraries, services, and tools supported by the provider.3 The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, or storage, but has control over the deployed applications and possibly configuration settings for the application-hosting environment. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The capability provided to the consumer is to provision processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources where the consumer is able to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can include operating systems and applications. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure but has control over operating systems, storage, and deployed applications; and possibly limited control of select networking components (e.g., host firewalls).1 The technological implementations that satisfy above criteria are treated as cloud computing. Now we see what is the current condition of the cloud computing market? Rajkumar et al. has explored the current cloud computing market: Cloud computing is expected to be a $160- billion addressable market opportunity, including $95-billion in business and productivity applications, and another $65-billion in online advertising. Another research study by Morgan Stanley has also identified Cloud computing as one of the prominent technology trends. As the computing industry shifts toward providing Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) for consumers and enterprises to access on demand regardless of time and location, there will be an increase in the number of Cloud platforms available. Recently, several academic and industrial organizations have started investigating and developing technologies and infrastructure for Cloud Computing. Academic efforts include Virtual Workspaces and OpenNebula.2 From this information it can be understood how important the cloud computing market is and how more important is going to be. In this paper some most common cloud service provider are presented as examples. We are citing some of the major examples here: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides a virtual computing environment that enables a user to run Linux-based applications. The user can either create a new Amazon Machine Image (AMI) containing the applications, libraries, data and associated configuration settings, or select from a library of globally available AMIs. Google App Engine allows a user to run Web applications written using the Python programming language. Sun network.com (Sun Grid) enables the user to run Solaris OS, Java, C, C++, and FORTRAN based applications.2

In case of cloud storage, different service providers are providing different kind of service using different technologies. This has been depicted in a paper by Chappell et al.: Amazons Simple Storage Service (S3) provides basic unstructured remote storage. The model it exposes to developers is straightforward: objects, which are just bunches of bytes, are stored in buckets. Applications can create, read, and delete objects and buckets.. Another approach to cloud storage is to support more structured data. In Microsofts SQL Server Data Services (SSDS), for example, a container includes one or more entities, each of which holds some number of properties3 Chappell et al. also depicts the examples of cloud application services: Many other application services are available today. In fact, almost any Web site can expose its functionality as a cloud service for developers to use. Photo-sharing sites such as Googles Picasa and Microsofts Windows Live Photo Gallery do this, for example, as do online contacts applications such as Google Contacts and Microsofts Windows Live Contacts. One big motivation for exposing services is to make it easier to create mash-ups that exploit the functions of diverse Web applications.3 By reviewing these papers we get a clear idea of the current degree of implementation of cloud computing around the globe.

Prospect and Challenges of Cloud Bangladesh Stands in Contrast to World

Computing:

Where

In a EU expert group report the cause of utilizing cloud computing has been depicted: Economic considerations are one of the key reasons to introduce cloud systems in a business environment in the first instance. The particular interest typically lies in the reduction of cost and effort through outsourcing and / or automation of essential resource management. As has been noted in the first section, relevant aspects thereby to consider relate to the cut-off between loss of control and reduction of effort. With respect to hosting private clouds, the gain through cost reduction has to be carefully balanced with the increased effort to build and run such a system.4 How cloud will propagate in future is also described in the report: Overall, public clouds of the types introduced in section II.A.1 are commercially available a more exhaustive comparison of existing providers and their features at the time of writing is available through Webhosting Unleashed [34] and Infoworld.com [35]. Current cloud systems still suffer a lot of drawbacks and do not overall offer the infrastructure expected to be required in the near future - this relates in particular to the typical topics in the IT area, i.e. Data Management, Privacy & Security, Virtualisation and Resource Control .
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At the same time, existing infrastructures will be difficult to change to new technologies and / or conceptual approaches, making long-term interoperability and standardisation efforts difficult whereby standardization typically follows interoperability efforts in the commercial domain. But this also poses problems on modelling the policies and dynamic aspects of resource management . Implicitly, non-technical aspects, such as restrictions due to Legislation & Policies, but also Economical Concerns related to whether the move to a cloud infrastructure is economically feasible are of major concern for commercial providers.4 The report refers to technical and non technical chllanges in implementing cloud computing: Manageability: Whilst most cloud system allow for main features related to elasticity and availability (see Table 1 and Table 4 above), the management features are nowhere near optimal resource usage issues not only relevant for cost reduction, but also for meeting the green agenda and for ensuring availability when resources are limited. Data management: ..Not only data size poses a problem for cloud systems, but more importantly consistency maintenance (see section III on Data Management), in particular when scaling up. Privacy and Security: Strongly related to the issues concerning legislation and data distribution is the concern of data protection and other potential security holes arising from the fact that the resources are shared between multiple tenants and the location of the resources being potentially unknown. In particular sensitive data or protected applications are critical for outsourcing issues. In some use cases, the information that a certain industry is using the infrastructure at all is enough information for industrial espionage. Federation & Interoperability: .One of the most pressing issues with respect to cloud computing is the current difference between the individual vendor approaches, and the implicit lack of interoperability. Whilst a distributed data environment (IaaS) cannot be easily moved to any platform provider (PaaS) and may even cause problems to be used by a specific service (SaaS), it is also almost impossible to move a service / image / environment between providers on the same level (e.g. from Force.com to Amazon). Virtual isation, Elasticity and Adaptability: .Though virtualisation techniques have improved considerably over recent years, additional issues arise with the advent of cloud systems that have not been fully elaborated before in particular related to the elasticity of the system (horizontal and vertical up- and down-scaling), interoperability and manageability & control of the resources. Changes in the configuration of the service / data need to be reflected by the setup of the underlying resources (according to their capabilities and capacities), but also changes in the infrastructure need to be exploited by the virtual environment without impacting on the hosted capabilities.
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Legislation, Government & Policies: .Not only data is subject to specific legislation issues that may depend on the location they are currently hosted in, but also applications and services, in particular regarding their licensing models. Legislation issues arise due to the fact that different countries put forward different laws regarding which kind of data is allowed, but also which data may be hosted where. With the cloud principally hosting data / code anywhere within the distributed infrastructure, i.e. potentially anywhere in the world, new legislative models have to be initiated, and / or new means to handle legislative constraints during data distribution.4 All these challenges stated above are true in case of Bangladesh. In our report we are going to find how to coupe up with these challenges in our country. As a model we are going to analyze the example of India. To take India as an example we went through papers written in Indian context. The paper of M. Sharma et al. depicted a clear overview of implementation of cloud computing in India: India is growing at faster pace in information technology sector thereby showing a great potential for the cloud computing services. According to Springboard Research report (Jan 2009) SAAS India i.e. software as a service in India will register a compounded annual growth rate of 76% in the time period of 2007-2011. Cloud computing services has huge opportunity in Indian market due to the large number of Small and Medium businesses (SMBs) which is at around 35 million and they want easy to use , reliable and scalable application that helps them to grow and expand their business. This makes India as the fastest growing SAAS market in Asia Pacific region. According to Jeremy Cooper, VPMarketing (APAC), Salesforce.com 'software as a service' provider started its services in India in September 2005 and since then the adoption rate of cloud computing is increasing .Seeing SAAS success on September 2008 IBM launched cloud computing center in India at Bangalore. This center will cater to the increasing demand of web based infrastructure sharing services. IBM India collaborated with IIT Kanpur to come up with some new developments in computing that will help in academic advancement. Bharti Airtel has launched the cloud computing services with their NetPc model and other giant companies like Reliance Communications, TCS, HCL technologies, Wipro, Netmagic, Verizon, Novatium etc. have also launched cloud computing services in India.5 Through analyzing Indian trends and style of adopting cloud computing, we would try to plan an appropriate cloud computing model for Bangladesh with special emphasis on business use.

Implementing Cloud Computing in Bangladesh: Opportunities and Challenges

The scenario of Bangladesh is not much different from the world. We have adopted IT framework developed by first world countries very quickly, but we are slow while adopting cloud computing. There are some causes which have been discussed by R. Mazumder et al.: a)[cloud computing] Requires a constant Internet connection. b) Doesn't work well with low-speed connections c) low-speed internet connection, such as that found with dial-up services, makes cloud computing painful at best and often impossible6 These are the basic problems. Besides these, in Bangladesh, the challenges noted by the EU research paper should also be countered. Not much research papers have been published by Bangladeshi scholars considering cloud computing. So, we basically have to rely on the papers from abroad and should try to compare the condition of those country with the condition here in Bangladesh.

References
1 The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing Special Publication 800-145 2 Rajkumar Buyya, Chee Shin Yeo, and Srikumar Venugopal Market-Oriented Cloud Computing: Vision, Hype, and Reality for Delivering IT Services as Computing Utilities Cluster Computing and the Grid, 2009. CCGRID '09. 9th IEEE/ACM International Symposium 3 David Chappell A Short Introduction to Cloud Platforms an Enterprise-Oriented View Microsoft Corporation August 2008 4 EU Expert Group Report THE FUTURE OF CLOUD COMPUTING Public Version 1.0 5 Monika Sharma, Ashwani Mehra, Haresh Jola, Anand Kumar Dr.Madhvendra Misra, Ms.Vijayshri Tiwari Scope of cloud computing for SMEs in India JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 2, ISSUE 5, MAY 2010 6 Rashed Mazumder, Md. Rashedul Hasan Rakib, and Muhammad Shahin Uddin Implementation of Cloud Computing in IT Sector: Perspective of Bangladesh International Journal of Research and Reviews in Computer Science (IJRRCS)