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Cloud Computing: The Future of Big Data Management

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 International Journal of Cloud Applications and Computing, 5(2), 53-61, April-June 2015 53

Cloud Computing:
The Future of Big Data Management
Shimaa Ouf, Faculty of Commerce and Business Administration, Helwan University, Helwan,
Egypt
Mona Nasr, Faculty of Computers and Information, Helwan University, Helwan, Egypt

ABSTRACT
The population is living in a complex world at information explosion age. Today in Enterprises, the size and
complexity of managing information have been increasing significantly and the demand for cost efficient
information storage and processing grows higher. Enterprises need to optimize their IT management and
minimize server maintenance costs become greater as usage demands prove to be increasingly unpredict-
able. Cloud computing offers a promising solution. Cloud computing is a computing model that relies on
a large, centralized data center to store and process a great wealth of information. Computing power and
storage space are provided on-demand to Enterprises that outsource their IT management to the cloud ser-
vice provider. The immediate advantage to this computing model is a lower infrastructure maintenance cost.
Since Enterprises that use cloud no longer require on-site servers, they eliminate the associated cost in IT
management and electrical power.

Keywords: BigData, Cloud Computing, DBMS, Virtualization

1. INTRODUCTION support these demands (Ebner, Hozinger &

Enterprises of the 21st century make great
demands on managing large amount of infor-
mation. Enterprises permanently keep pace
with today’s changing situations, adjust their
skills and expertise with agility, collaborate
and compete to provide value to society. It is
well documented that our society is character-
ized by rapidly developing and ever changing
political, social, economic, educational, tech-
nological and environmental situations (Gütl
& Chang, 2008). As a result, Enterprises must
Maurer, 2007).
As data volumes increase at exponential
speed in more and more application fields
of science, the challenges posed by handling
BigData gain an increasing importance.
The need for managing BigData is in-
creasing constantly and the development and
the improvement of the BigData Management
solutions is necessary. Also, Enterprises need
to keep the pace with the technology (Pocatilu,
Alecu & Vetrici, 2010), so recently research
community has believed that cloud computing
is the best solution for managing BigData. Also,

DOI: 10.4018/IJCAC.2015040104

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54 International Journal of Cloud Applications and Computing, 5(2), 53-61, April-June 2015
Figure 1. Adopting cloud computing technology to manage BigData [6]
There is no doubt that the future belongs
to the cloud computing. This new technologi-
cal environment supports the creation of a new
generation of Enterprises that is able to run on a
wide range of hardware devices, while storing
data inside the cloud (Ouf, Nasr & Helmy, 2010).
Cloud computing is becoming an adaptable
technology for many of the Enterprises with
its dynamic scalability and usage of virtualized
resources as a service through the Internet. It
will likely have an important impact on the
business environment in the future. Today
Enterprises can get Infrastructure as a Service
(IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) or Software
as a Service (SaaS). There are elastic clouds
where memory and processing power get al-
located based on computing resources required
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at the time (Zhang, Cheng & Boutaba, 2010).
So, the aim of this paper is to investigate the
adoption process of new technologies in manag-
ing Enterprise’s BigData in situations of high
complex environment, specifically uncertainty
about external, internal, and technology factors
surrounding the adoption of a new technology.
This paper is organized as follows: Section 2
focuses on mobility, cloud computing concepts
and benefits, Section 3 describes the key players
in the Cloud Computing, Section 4 and Section
5 illustrates a proposed model for BigData in
the cloud (see Figure 1).
 International Journal of Cloud Applications and Computing, 5(2), 53-61, April-June 2015 55
2. MOBILITY, BIG DATA AND
THE CLOUD COMPUTING
Mobility is accessing information anywhere at
any time. Emerging technologies like Big Data,
cloud and mobility become powerful trends to
create a new platform for enterprises to develop
new business capabilities.
What is cloud computing and what does
it mean for IT? This is a question that is fre-
quently asked by people inside and outside
technology industry. Information technology
is changing rapidly, so cloud computing birth
came to explore the next generation in com-
putation. Cloud computing has become one
of the hottest buzzwords in the IT area. Many
Enterprises are rushing to define clouds and
provide cloud solutions in various ways (Ouf,
Nasr & Helmy, 2010).
Figure 2. Cloud computing [3]
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Cloud computing is Internet based comput-
ing, where by shared resources, software, and
information are provided to computers and other
devices on demand, like the electricity grid
(Ouf, Nasr & Helmy, 2010). Due to the fact it
involves the existence of data centers that are
able to provide services; the cloud can be seen
as a unique access point for all requests coming
from the world wide spread clients (Pocatilu,
Alecu & Vetrici, 2010) (see Figure 2).
It allows Enterprises to store BigData
without, the need to purchase, install, or sup-
port software on their local computers and/or
servers, worrying about how to maintain these
systems (Ouf, Nasr & Helmy, 2010).
New advances in processors, Virtualization
technology, disk storage, broadband internet
access and fast, inexpensive servers have all
56 International Journal of Cloud Applications and Computing, 5(2), 53-61, April-June 2015
Figure 3. What Industries Can Do with Big Data [6]
combined to make cloud computing a compel-
ling paradigm (Wheeler & Waggener, 2009).
One of the most important feature ideas
behind cloud computing is scalability, and
the key technology which makes it possible
is Virtualization (Dong, Zheng et al., 2009).
Virtualization breaks down the physical barriers
inherent in isolated resources, and automates
the management of these resources as a single
entity through hypervisor technology such as
VMs (Virtual Machines).
Cloud computing has critical impact on im-
portant areas of IT, like security, infrastructure,
investments, and more (Turner, 2009). It is a way
to increase capacity or add capabilities on the
fly, reduce Enterprise IT costs & complexities
while improving workload optimization and
service delivery, allows for much more efficient
computing by centralizing storage, memory,
processing and bandwidth without investing
in new infrastructure, training new personnel,
purchase software, or licensing new software
(Thomas). So, cloud computing becomes an
adaptable technology for many of Enterprises
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with its dynamic scalability and use of virtual-
ized resources as a service through the internet.
2.1. Potential Values of Cloud
Computing for Enterprises
• Provide opportunity for ubiquitous comput-
ing (T. E., 2010).
• No need for backing up everything to a
thumb drive and transferring it from one
device to another.
• No need to copy all stuff from one PC to
another when buying a new one. It also
means students can create a repository of
information that stays with them and keeps
growing as long as he wants them.
• Provides large amounts of processing
power comparable to supercomputer level.
• Crash recovery is nearly unneeded. If the
client computer crashes, there are almost
no data lost because everything is stored
in the cloud (Masud & Huang).
• Most software is free, available and
ready-to-use.
 International Journal of Cloud Applications and Computing, 5(2), 53-61, April-June 2015 57
Figure 4. Cloud computing layers
• Flexibility scale infrastructure to maximize
investments. Cloud computing allows En-
terprises to dynamically scale as demands
fluctuate (Aldakheel, 2011).
• Accessibility helps make data and services
publicly available without jeopardizing
sensitive information.
Also cloud computing provides some major
security benefits for Enterprises that are using
it for managing BigData, like the following:
• Improved Improbability: It is almost
impossible for any interested person (thief)
to determine where is located the machine
that stores some wanted data or to find
out which is the physical component he
needs to steal in order to get a digital asset
(Pocatilu, Alecu & Vetrici, 2010).
• Virtualization: Makes possible the rapid
replacement of a compromised cloud lo-
cated server without major costs or dam-
ages. It is very easy to create a clone of a
virtual machine so the cloud downtime is
expected to be reduced substantially.
• Centralized Data Storage: Losing a cloud
client is no longer a major incident while
the main part of the applications and data
is stored in the cloud so a new client can
be connected very fast.
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• Monitoring of data access becomes easier in
view of the fact that only one place should
be supervised, not thousands of computers
belonging to educational institutes, for
example. Also, the security changes can
be easily tested and implemented since
the cloud represents a unique entry point
for all the clients (Liang, 2011).
Cloud computing is an excellent alterna-
tive for Enterprises which are especially under
budget shortage to manage BigData (Ercan,
2010) (see Figure 3).
2.2. Key Players in the
Cloud Computing
There is several cloud computing service provid-
ers that offer support for Enterprises (Table 1).
3. CLOUD COMPUTING LAYERS
3.1. Which Cloud is Right
for the Enterprises?
The choice to move to the cloud is not an all
or nothing proposition. With different types of
cloud offerings, Enterprise has flexible options
about which services to obtain in the cloud and
which to keep on the site. Enterprise priorities
58 International Journal of Cloud Applications and Computing, 5(2), 53-61, April-June 2015

Table 1. Key players in cloud computing

Company Top 3 Offering Name Year of Launch Key Offerings

Amazon.com AWS(Amazon Web 2006 Infrastructure as a
Services) service(storage, computing,
messages Queues, Datasets,
Content Distribution)
Microsoft Microsoft Windows Azure 2010 Application platform as
a service(.Net, SQL Data
Services)
Google Google App Engine 2008 Web Application platform
as a service(python Runtime
Environment)
Next
IBM Blue Cloud 2008 Virtualized blue cloud data
center(Wuxi China Center)
Salesforce.com Force.com 2008 Proprietary 4GL Web
application framework as on
Demand platform

and security requirements determine the level of 3.4. Infrastructure as a Service

cloud capabilities to explore. If we look closely
at the cloud in Figure 4, three distinct sets of
offerings will be introduced: Infrastructure as
a service (Iaas), Platform as a service (Paas)
and Software as a service (Saas) (Kim, 2009).
3.2. Software as a Service (SaaS)
It helps Enterprises with limited IT resources to
deploy and maintain needed software in a timely
manner while, at the same time, reducing energy
consumption and expenses (Turner, 2009).
3.3. Platform as a Service
Deliver a computing platform and/or solution
stack as a service, often consuming cloud in-
frastructure and sustaining cloud applications
(Subashini & Kavitha, 2011). It facilitates devel-
opment and deployment of applications without
the cost and complexity of buying and managing
the underlying infrastructure (hardware (server,
storage and network), and associated software
(operating systems Virtualization technology,
file system)) (Gütl & Chang, 2008).
IaaS providers abstract IT infrastructure re-
sources such as CPU, storage and memory as a
services. A cloud provider manages the physical
infrastructure; provisions virtualized instances
of operating systems to the cloud Enterprises.
Enterprise here is given complete ownership of
the virtual image which it can choose to con-
figure as they think appropriate. The service is
typically billed on a utility computing basis and
amount of resources consumed (and therefore
the cost) will typically reflect the level of activ-
ity. It is an evolution of virtual private server
offerings (Armbrust et al., 2010).
4. PROPOSED MODEL FOR
BIGDATA IN THE CLOUD
The world’s data is growing at an exponential
rate, and one of the major problems with Big-
Data is its sheer size. As result Bigdata faced
challenges in handling rapid storage growth
requirements, cost controlling and greater flex-
ibility. The BigData in the Cloud environment
provides a new paradigm for addressing these
challenges (Ahuja & Moore, 2013). It presents

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 International Journal of Cloud Applications and Computing, 5(2), 53-61, April-June 2015 59

Figure 5. Scalable cloud computing database management systems to support large applications
with lots of data and supporting hundreds of thousands of clients

advanced solutions for the efficient management
of BigData in the context of Cloud computing,
new development and deployment efforts in
running data-intensive computing workloads
and solves problems faced by application de-
velopers and DBMS designers in developing
and deploying internet scale applications.
Cloud computing provides a solution that
meets scalability needs, increase or decrease
the number of machines storing BigData in
order to handle the actual load being placed.
Cloud Database is the relational database
service on the cloud computing platform. It
provides a cloud based database management
system (DBMS). This technology lets Enter-
prises store relational data on cloud servers in
service provider data centers. Using a cloud
database also allows converting what would be
capital expenses, such as investments in disks
and DBMS software, into operating expenses.
Benefits include manageability, high availabil-
ity because all data stored in cloud Database
is replicated three times, scalability, a familiar
development model, a relational data model
and provide reliable data storage even in the

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60 International Journal of Cloud Applications and Computing, 5(2), 53-61, April-June 2015
face of system and network failures. Figure 5
shows the basics of this technology.
5. CONCLUSION
With the huge growth of data, Enterprise is
facing challenges of optimizing resource al-
locations, dealing with dynamic concurrency
demands, handling rapid storage growth re-
quirements, cost controlling and lack the sup-
port of underlying infrastructures, which can
dynamically allocate the required computation
and storage resources for Enterprise’s Big-
Data. So the best solution for this is adopting
new technologies within an Enterprise. Cloud
Computing is such area that is beginning to
significantly impact how BigData is managed,
deployed and used. Cloud Computing presents
a new way of deploying Enterprise’s BigData.
It allows an Enterprise with the infrastructure
which is reliable, flexible, cost efficient, self-
regulated, and QoS guaranteed infrastructure.
Today Enterprises can get Infrastructure as a
Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) or
Software as a Service (SaaS). There are elastic
clouds where memory and processing power
get allocated based on computing resources
required at the time. The goal of this paper is
to adopt new technology in managing BigData.
New technology plays an important role in
enhancing the effectiveness and efficiencies
of managing BigData and having a significant
effect on the Enterprise. Using cloud computing
for managing Enterprise’s BigData influences
the way that BigData are managed, make it
available, scalable, and productive and improve
performance.
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Shimaa Ouf is currently a teaching assistant at the Business Information Systems Department, Faculty of
Commerce and Business Administration, at Helwan University. She was born in Cairo, Egypt. She received
the Bachelor degree in Information Systems from Faculty of Commerce and Business Administration,
Helwan University, Egypt, 2007. High diploma in “Busienss Information Technology” from Faculty of
Computers and Information, Helwan University, Egypt, 2008. M.Sc. degree in information systems from
Faculty of Computers and Information, Helwan University, Egypt, 2012. Eng. Shimaa Ouf has published
many articles in International journals and conferences in the area of Cloud Computing, Business Intel-
ligence, e-Learning.
Mona Nasr is currently associate professor at Information Systems Department, Faculty of Computers
and Information, Helwan University. She was born in Cairo, Egypt. She received the B.A. degree in Com-
merce major Accounting from Faculty of Commerce, Ain Shams University, Egypt, 1992. High diploma in
“Computers in Commercial Applications”, from Faculty of Commerce, Ain Shams University, Egypt, 1997.
M.Sc. degree in information systems from Faculty of Computers and Information, Helwan Univeristy, Egypt,
2000. Ph.D. degree in Information Systems from Faculty of Computers and Information, Helwan Univeristy,
Egypt, 2006, Dissertation Topic: A Proposed Paradigm for Securing Software Mobile Agent Systems. Dr.
Mona has published many articles in International journals and conferences in the area of Cloud Comput-
ing, Mobile Agents, Information Security and Software Engineering, e-Learning, Conceptual Mapping, BI
& GIS. She participated in organizing many conferences and workshops, and she is an active reviewer for
numerous international journals. She is Supervising many M.Sc. & Ph.D. Theses, Vice Executive Manager
for Development of Students’ Assessment System project for Helwan University (8 Faculties), Project No.
AP1–028– HEL, -Registrar for Software Engineering Department (From 2010/2011 –2013/2014), Ex-
Manager of Student Assessment & Exams Unit at Faculty of Computers &Information, Board Member of
the Egyptian Society for Information Systems and Computers Technology, member in other societies such
as (IEDRC, IACSIT, MJC, TWOWS/OWSD, CSTA, IAOE,...etc), and Supervising many graduation projects.

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