Current State Survey and Future Opportunities for Trust and Security in Green Cloud Computing

Introduction

Cloud computing is an emerging as a model which support the “everything-as-a-service” (XaaS) (Baran, 2008). Virtualized physical resources, virtualized infrastructure, as well as virtualized middleware platforms and business applications are being provided and consumed as services in the Cloud (Lenk, Klems, Nimis, Tai, & Sandholm, 2009). Cloud computing started its base in the mid of 2007 and is growing rapidly till date (Rizwana & Sasikumar, 2012). It has many features that make users want to switch to the cloud computing environment. The manufacturer provides relevant hardware, software and service according to the need that users put forward (Shuai, Shufen, Chen, & Huo, 2010). With the rapid development of the Internet, user’s requirement is realized through the Internet. In fact, cloud computing is an extend of grid computing, distributed computing, and parallel computing. Its foreground is to provide secure, quick and convenient data storage (Shuai, Shufen, Chen, & Huo, 2010). Many forecasting agencies have said that cloud computing is large and it's only going to grow exponentially. IDC said that in the next year’s spending on IT cloud services would increase a lot and would reach several billions of dollars. Another agency said that cloud computing would go to $500 billion as an industry by 2020.

One of the quotes way spread across actually was “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home” from Ken Olson who in 1977 who was a president chairman and founder of Dec big business mainframe computer company that was later bought by Compact which was later bought by HP. Back then there was those big mainframe computers and everyone could access them. Over the years and the evolution of the desktop computer everyone had a computer in their home, every person who works in a company has a desktop computer on his desk. Fortunately, things have started to come back around with the growth of server based computing which is similar to mainframe in the concept that computing is happening actually in the datacenter and you really just viewing the screen. Back in the mainframe it was just text that we would see in the screen but today of course there are those nice GUI environments. Some people called this server based computing “the cloud”. Marketers throw the term cloud around left and right and that's what created so much confusion. So back to the quote, actually today everyone can use a thin client device and can access the computers that's running in the cloud. But then the question is what exactly is cloud computing?