Optimizing the utilization of computing systems based on systems security ranking.

Optimizing The Utilization Of Computing Systems Based On Security Systems

Ranking

Abstract:

Changes in the technological advancements changes requirements quite often.

Advancements in technology add on as a need for the Cloud providers to keep up with

them, especially in the field of security as security is always a top priority to the end

users. However, keeping up with latest advancements in security is not easy as it

requires lot of investments. The idea in this article solves this problem by proposing to

define security ranking of the systems based on their capabilities.

Description:

The big data centers comprise of thousands of systems. These data centers are built over

a period of time and consists of both legacy and new range of systems. Apart from other

functional requirements, one of the key requirements from customers is security

requirements. The customer security requirements may also change over the period of

time and might get stricter. These requirements may not be getting satisfied by the current

or legacy systems in the data center. However, upgradation to the new systems is

expensive for the business. In such cases, the question that comes up is how to satisfy

the customers’ security requirements. The idea in this article solves the problem for such

Cloud Providers who had put up so much investments on systems. However,after

sometime these systems do not satisfy security requirements for all the customers in an

IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) environment. For Example:

◦ Some systems come with cryptography acceleration but others might not have

it. So, if a provider had recently purchased a system without these security

features, but now has a new healthcare client that needs them, then he might

have to purchase newer hardware. But what does he do with his investments

on hardware without these security features?

◦ Some other end users might have a requirement that their virtual machine

should be provisioned on a system which has security protection end-to-end

from hardware to virtual machine in the stack.

◦ Some users on the other hand might require just a particular security function

provided by the hardware.

Economically, the data centers can update to few latest systems within their budget

requirements and maintain both the legacy and new systems. This way they can continue

to use their investment in the legacy systems. However, the question still exists as to how

best to satisfy the security needs of customers like the ones called out above. Looking at

these systems from security perspective, they form a pool of systems which can satisfy

different security requirements. There might be a customer with no security specific

workload for eg, public photo sharing forums, but there can also be a financial customer

with not only a specific security requirement like say Kerberos authentication but also

expecting his system to be compliant to say PCI (Payment card Industry) security

standard. In such case a customer’s workload...