Article Preview
Top1. Introduction
Agriculture is the spine of Indian economy that contributes about 40 percent towards Gross National Product (GNP) and 70 per cent of the population depend on it. So, for a country that is primarily dependent on agriculture, requires accurate and timely information of data such as type of crop grown, crop yield, and crop growth condition. This information is important factor in meeting country’s food security and distribution system. Pre-harvest assessments of crop production are required for obtaining optimal strategies for planning, distribution, price fixation, transportation and storage of critical agricultural products (Bernard, 2003).
The space borne remote sensing forecasting and GIS Technology are providing information to user for various agricultural applications. They provide information such as marginal crop grown in fragmented land holdings, quantification of its effect on crops yield and detection of crop stress due to nutrients and diseases. Efficient agro-data access and storage methodologies is needed for improving crop yield models (David, 2006).
With the enormous growth of information technology such as Internet of Things, Cloud computing etc., huge volumes of data are being continuously generated by various organizations for various application uses. An efficient storage and access mechanism of large scale data with minimal cost is most desired. Achieving data sharing and collaboration between stake holders at various levels are the research challenges for organizations/enterprises (Sengupta et al., 2015). To solve the research problem cloud storage service is adopted, which is low cost and convenient.
Cloud storage service is a significant part of cloud computing environment (Wu et al., 2010), where data is stored in storage resources in cloud environment. The user/stake holders can access the storage resource anytime and anywhere through the Internet. Adopting Cloud computing for Agro services offers following benefits/features such as 1) Ease to expand- as per application needs the storage size can be increased. 2) Reliable and secure- it can automatically backup data even during node failure and offers guarantee of data availability to end users. 3) Resource control- it offers user to create different access policies for controlling data access permission. 4) High resource utilization- cloud can abstract all the storage resource and offers a integrated access interface to end clients. 5) Low cost- it efficiently minimize the cost of each users and organization (i.e. no upkeep cost for procuring removable storage devices).
Recently, number of cloud storage systems such as Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, S3 etc. are offered by Microsoft, IBM, Google, Amazon etc. All these cloud storage systems are primarily designed to offer storage services for individual user’s requirement and they cannot meet the demand of enterprises (cloud based agro service). For provisioning cloud storage for enterprises following features need to be considered. 1) Flexible fine-grained access control mechanism- a grained access control policy need to be defined for users to access the data from any directory/buckets. 2) Multi-user sharing and cooperation- the cloud storage access system should allow bucket sharing among users to access same resource, 3) Capacity expansion- it should offer convenient cluster expansion when requirement arise. 4) Data security and privacy- it should offer continuous access of data to user during node failure. 5) Flexible user disk space quota management- it should offer storage services to user based on roles defined for achieving flexible storage assignment for different users. 6) Ease of use- the system should offer service convenient to user with minimal cost and latency.