Biblio

Cloud computing presents unlimited prospects for Information Technology (IT) industry and business enterprises alike. Rapid advancement brings a dark underbelly of new vulnerabilities and challenges unfolding with alarming regularity. Although cloud technology provides a ubiquitous environment facilitating business enterprises to conduct business across disparate locations, security effectiveness of this platform interspersed with threats which can bring everything that subscribes to the cloud, to a halt raises questions. However advantages of cloud platforms far outweighs drawbacks and study of new challenges helps overcome drawbacks of this technology. One such emerging security threat is of ransomware attack on the cloud which threatens to hold systems and data on cloud network to ransom with widespread damaging implications. This provides huge scope for IT security specialists to sharpen their skillset to overcome this new challenge. This paper covers the broad cloud architecture, current inherent cloud threat mechanisms, ransomware vulnerabilities posed and suggested methods to mitigate it.

The digital forensics refers to the application of scientific techniques in investigation of a crime, specifically to identify or validate involvement of some suspect in an activity leading towards that crime. Network forensics particularly deals with the monitoring of network traffic with an aim to trace some suspected activity from normal traffic or to identify some abnormal pattern in the traffic that may give clue towards some attack. Network forensics, quite valuable phenomenon in investigation process, presents certain challenges including problems in accessing network devices of cloud architecture, handling large amount network traffic, and rigorous processing required to analyse the huge volume of data, of which large proportion may prove to be irrelevant later on. Cloud Computing technology offers services to its clients remotely from a shared pool of resources, as per clients customized requirement, any time, from anywhere. Cloud Computing has attained tremendous popularity recently, leading to its vast and rapid deployment, however Privacy and Security concerns have also increased in same ratio, since data and application is outsourced to a third party. Security concerns about cloud architecture have come up as the prime barrier hindering the major shift of industry towards cloud model, despite significant advantages of cloud architecture. Cloud computing architecture presents aggravated and specific challenges in the network forensics. In this paper, I have reviewed challenges and issues faced in conducting network forensics particularly in the cloud computing environment. The study covers limitations that a network forensic expert may confront during investigation in cloud environment. I have categorized challenges presented to network forensics in cloud computing into various groups. Challenges in each group can be handled appropriately by either Forensic experts, Cloud service providers or Forensic tools whereas leftover challenges are declared as be- ond the control.

Using heterogeneous clouds has been considered to improve performance of big-data analytics for healthcare platforms. However, the problem of the delay when transferring big-data over the network needs to be addressed. The purpose of this paper is to analyze and compare existing cloud computing environments (PaaS, IaaS) in order to implement middleware services. Understanding the differences and similarities between cloud technologies will help in the interconnection of healthcare platforms. The paper provides a general overview of the techniques and interfaces for cloud computing middleware services, and proposes a cloud architecture for healthcare. Cloud middleware enables heterogeneous devices to act as data sources and to integrate data from other healthcare platforms, but specific APIs need to be developed. Furthermore, security and management problems need to be addressed, given the heterogeneous nature of the communication and computing environment. The present paper fills a gap in the electronic healthcare register literature by providing an overview of cloud computing middleware services and standardized interfaces for the integration with medical devices.