Establishing Synergy between Cloud Computing and Colloborative Technology in Medical Informatics

The Health care sector needs information driven service. Information is a major resource which is important to health of individual patient and the success of hospitals. The understanding between medical professionals and software professionals can be a main force behind the design, management and use of health care data and information. Health care information systems need to move from traditional integrated database to knowledge based database. Generally, data in health care sector is available as disperse elements; when it is compiled into a meaningful pattern, then it becomes information. And as information is converted into valid basis for action, then it becomes knowledge. This chapter explains making use of the concepts such as cloud computing, pervasive computing, virtual reality along with the other collaborative technology which will facilitate to create knowledge based health care system.

Heuristic Task Consolidation Techniques for Energy Efficient Cloud Computing

The energy consumption in the cloud is proportional to the resource utilization and data centers are almost the world's highest consumers of electricity. The complexity of the resource allocation problem increases with the size of cloud infrastructure and becomes difficult to solve effectively. The exponential solution space for the resource allocation problem can be searched using heuristic techniques to obtain a sub-optimal solution at the acceptable time. This chapter presents the resource allocation problem in cloud computing as a linear programming problem, with the objective to minimize energy consumed in computation. This resource allocation problem has been treated using heuristic approaches. In particular, we have used two phase selection algorithm ‘FcfsRand', ‘FcfsRr', ‘FcfsMin', ‘FcfsMax', ‘MinMin', ‘MedianMin', ‘MaxMin', ‘MinMax', ‘MedianMax', and ‘MaxMax'. The simulation results indicate in the favor of MaxMax.

The Role of Cloud Computing in Global Supply Chain

This chapter reviews the role of cloud computing in global supply chain, thus describing the theoretical and practical concepts of cloud computing and supply chain management (SCM); the significance of cloud computing in global supply chain; the overview of electronic supply chain management (e-SCM); and the organizational information processing theory within global supply chain. The utilization of cloud computing is necessary for modern organizations that seek to serve suppliers and customers, increase business performance, strengthen competitiveness, and achieve continuous success in global business. Therefore, it is essential for modern organizations to examine their cloud computing applications, develop a strategic plan to regularly check their practical advancements, and immediately respond to the cloud computing needs of customers in global supply chain. Applying cloud computing in global supply chain will extremely improve organizational performance and reach business goals in the digital age.

Big Data in Cloud Computing Environment for Market Trends

The Industrial and Business landscape is changing because of the convergence of information technology and communication technologies. This convergence is creating new types of companies competing with each other. It is not about east or west, or developed markets versus developing markets; It is all about how soon a business enterprise understands the emerging technology and adapts it into its business. It is not enough that a business enterprise understands the technology but one has to be good at thinking about the applications of the technology. Now it has become a necessity for business enterprises to manage complex and interdisciplinary requirements in their organization. This chapter explores a business model developed by a textile mill to remain competitive in global market that uses the concepts of big data, cloud computing, virtual reality, and data warehousing.

Personal Mobile Cloud Computing Affordances for Higher Education

Within the cloud computing ecosystem and its different permutations, there exists personal mobile cloud computing. The latter has not been covered and investigated much in relation to its affordances for higher education (HE), especially in South Africa. Thus, this chapter argues that personal mobile cloud computing can offer HE significant educational affordances in the form of cloud computing value chain. It does so by providing one South African example entailing a two-project study in the HE sector in which the cloud affordances of Twitter and Facebook were leveraged for educational purposes. Regarding Twitter, one of its affordances is that it was exploited as a cloud based virtual blackboard for a course content, thereby facilitating micro-teaching and micro-learning. Concerning Facebook, one of its affordances is that it served as a cloud based mobile computing environment in which a course-specific writing process was mounted by the instructor and participants. A collective affordance for both Twitter and Facebook was both consumerization and BYOD approaches to teaching and learning.

Applying Kolb Learning Experiential Theory with Cloud Computing in Higher Education Institutions

The maturity of free and open source movement has brought a number of ICT tools. It has affected the way courses are delivered, the way contents are developed, the way data are interoperable, the way learning and teaching materials are shared, the way learners access classes and the way library resources are shared. In developing countries, several libraries are migrating into digital libraries using low cost technologies readily available due to open access, free and open source technology and e-publishing tools. Recent development of cloud computing technology provides state of art tools for libraries. It provides a common platform for easy information storage and sharing. Thus, there is lowering of the cost required to procure and manage library ICT infrastructure due to the capability of that cloud computing which allows the storage to be on a single, efficient system that saves cost and time. In developing countries where most libraries suffer from limited budgets for ICT services, it is anticipated that the future of digital libraries is on cloud libraries.

Design Considerations for a Corporate Cloud Service Catalog

This chapter will focus on building an end user service cloud catalog which will bridge the gap from the design requirements to the technology delivery organization. Once in the hands of IT, a more traditional service catalog can be used to leverage the service orchestration and delivery components. The author examines designing, building, and reviewing the impact of a more end user focused service catalog. Success will be measured by reviewing the business metrics in order to show the criticality of great design techniques and using familiar models like e-commerce.

An Interoperability Framework for Enterprise Applications in Cloud Environments

Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) are increasingly designed with cloud environments in mind, as a set of cooperating services deployed in a mix of platforms, including conventional servers and clouds, private and public. If enterprise value chains are considered, in which their EIS need to cooperate, solving all the interoperability problems raised by the need to meaningfully interconnect all these services constitutes a rather challenging endeavor. This chapter describes the concept of enterprise as a service, a collection of dynamically assembled services with a lifecycle centered on the customers, and proposes a multidimensional interoperability framework to help systematizing the various aspects relevant to interoperability. Besides lifecycle, this framework presents other dimensions, namely concreteness (with various levels of abstraction), interoperability (based on structural compliance and conformance), and concerns (to deal with non-functional aspects such as security, reliability and quality of service).

Design Challenges of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has recently emerged as a new paradigm of computing for hosting and delivering services over the Internet. It replaces computing as a personal commodity by computing as a public utility. It is attractive solution to business owners as it eliminates the requirement for users to plan ahead for provisioning, and allows enterprises to start from the small and increase resources only when there is a rise in service demand. However, despite the significant benefits, these technologies present many challenges including lack of security. The chapter presents an advanced survey focusing on cloud computing concept. It highlights its key concepts and presents a physical architecture of this environment. Finally, the chapter defines virtualization technology as a factor for cloud computing surge and discuses security issues that damage these systems. The aim of this chapter is to provide a better understanding of the design challenges of cloud computing.

Virtual Machine Placement Strategy for Cloud Data Center

The data center is the physical infrastructure layer in cloud architecture. To run a large data center requires a huge amount of power. A proper strategy can minimize the number of servers used. Minimization of active servers caused minimization of power consumption. But the maximum number of virtual machine placement will be a monetary benefit for cloud service providers. To earn maximum revenue, the CSP is to maximize resource utilization. VM placement is one of the major issues to achieve minimum power consumption as well as to earn maximum revenue by CSP. In this research chapter, we have formulated an optimization problem for initial VM placement in the data center. An iterative heuristic using simulated annealing has been used for VM placement problem. The proposed heuristic has been analysis to be scalable and the coding scheme shows that the proposed technique is outperforming traditional FFD on bin packing technique.