Security Issues of Cloud Migration and Optical Networking in Future Internet

Introduction

Continuous and rapid change, cost-saving aspects and the need for flexibility affect the industrial systems in Future Internet environment. Additional improvements in networking are required to tackle these challenges. Nowadays, cloud computing is recognized as a widespread networking approach with extensive acceptance and deployment. The concept of cloud computing along with the flexible network access and the scalable distributed computing provides a promising solution for many business challenges in the Future Internet environment. Due to numerous advantages, both business and public customers are gradually migrating to the cloud. Virtualization, as a key characteristic of cloud computing, enables flexible management of computing resources, distributing them as needed for a certain service into a data center, or spreading them across several data centers connected to the network (Contreras et al., 2012). The computing resources can be provided on demand, upon customers' requests. Such elasticity in resource utilization provides agile adaptation to the business requirements. In this multitenant model, the sharing of resources among numerous customers reduces costs and maximizes utilization, thus leveraging the economy of scale. Additionally, due to the possibility of resource allocation in different data centers, the provisioning of services, contents and applications to the customers become independent of where either the resource or the customer is located.

The versatile utilization of resources and the distinct requirements of the applications running can produce variable traffic patterns on the connections to the data centers. The flexibility provided by cloud computing dynamically changes the traffic demand, thus affecting network planning and dimensioning. The network utilization is time-varying and less predictable. Furthermore, various applications running on cloud systems lead to new traffic patterns including anycast flows. Those traffic flows can be described as one-to-one-of-many flows. Additionally, the concentration of processing in a relatively small number of data centers increases the volume of traffic on network links adjacent to these data centers. A new network concept is needed to support challenges emerged with cloud computing introduction. Such a concept should be capable of providing the required capacity on demand through automatic elastic connectivity services in a scalable and cost-efficient manner. Therefore, the new capacity demands require evolution to optical-transport-based solutions (Develder et al., 2012). A transport network is an indispensable segment of the cloud computing model and provides the connectivity among distributed computing resources. The cloud-ready transport network should meet requirements in terms of flexibility (the ability to guarantee the required capacity on demand), multilayer oriented network management and joint optimization of the resources of both the cloud-based applications and the underlying network providing connectivity (Klinkowski & Walkowiak, 2013).

Optical networks have an essential role in communication systems since they provide a reliable infrastructure for the transport of aggregated IP traffic. Recently, significant research advances emerged in optical networking, including developments of spectrally efficient modulation techniques and new optical components (Klinkowski & Walkowiak, 2013). These networking capabilities have led to the introduction of an elastic optical network (EON) infrastructure (Jinno et al., 2012). The newly introduced optical transport networks can utilize network resources more efficiently and concurrently, enable network connectivity adaptively to bandwidth demands. The capacity of a lightpath can be adjusted by allocating enough spectrum that satisfies traffic demand. Thus, resource utilization in EONs is vastly improved compared to conventional fixed-grid optical networks.

Due to the increasing number of threats in the optical networks, data security gains significant research interest. Since EON is the key development direction of the optical transport network, it is crucial to improve the defense capability of EON against the possible attacks. In this chapter, the cloud migration over elastic optical networks in the context of the content provisioning process is going to be addressed, with special reference on the security aspect of provisioning of services, contents and applications.