Page 1113 - Cloud computing: From paradigm to operation

Assisting developing countries 8

8.4 Electricity supply

Over 50 per cent of the CSP questionnaire respondents indicated that electricity supply is one of the main
challenges for the provision of cloud computing services.
The problems of electricity supply in most developing countries are similar and are usually three fold:
i) limited access: Vast areas of many developing countries have limited access to electricity.
ii) costly: Where electricity is available, it is usually expensive.
iii) poor quality: Electricity in most developing countries is of poor quality and intermittent.

Power may raise the operational cost for CSP while on other hand it may contribute to poor quality of service
if it is not reliable. These issues must be resolved if developing countries are to enjoy the benefits of cloud
computing services.

8.5 Network infrastructure

According to the findings of the questionnaires, broadband connectivity was identified by CSPs as the most
prevailing infrastructure requirement to support and enable access to cloud services.
In fact, cloud computing performance depends on consumer's Internet connection, used to access cloud
services. With a huge amount of data stored in the cloud, connections need to be high-speed and reliable in
order to allow cloud computing resources to be easily distributed, and without enough bandwidth, the
delivery of cloud computing services would not be feasible. Unfortunately, consumers' access to affordable
broadband Internet is still not satisfactory in many developing countries, especially in the least developed
countries. Most of these countries rely on mobile broadband networks which are in many cases characterized
by low speed and high latency and consequently are not suitable for cloud service delivery especially for
applications such as video-steaming and real-time computing.
Moreover, cloud performance closely depends on network performance. For this reason, and in order to
provide a real added value for cloud services, the network components for cloud services composition and
delivery should meet a number of requirements in terms of flexibility, scalability, and on-demand resource
provisioning, and offer the necessary advanced network functions to guarantee performance, security and
availability of cloud services.
According to [ITU-T Y.3510], there are several types of networks involved in cloud computing services delivery
and composition, such as:
i) intra-datacentre network, which is the network connecting local cloud infrastructures, such as the
data centre local area network use to connect servers, storage arrays and L4-L7 devices (e.g.,
firewalls, load balancers, application acceleration devices);

ii) access and core transport network, which is the network used by CSCs to access and consume cloud
services deployed by the CSP; and
iii) inter-datacentre network, which is the network interconnecting remote cloud infrastructures,
taking into account that these infrastructures may be owned by the same or different CSPs.

[ITU-T Y.3510] listed a number of requirements for the networking resources of each of the access and core
transport networks, intra-datacentre networks and inter-datacentre networks. However, some general
requirements are applicable on the three types of networks where networking resources should be scalable,
ensure services' performance and availability in order to meet SLA objectives, be able to adapt dynamically
to the traffic generated by cloud services, support IPv4 and IPv6 and support policy based control on flow by
flow basis in a fine-grained manner.

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