Journal of Smart Cities (Transferred)

The special issue “Smart Cities and Cloud Compu-ting” of the Journal of Smart Cities focuses on smart city solutions that are deployed over various types of cloud environment and discuss challenges and solu-tions related to the use of cloud computing, and main-ly the migration of smart city services to the Cloud.

Since the emergence of cloud computing paradigm, there has been an increasing interest on the adoption of cloud computing from municipalities and city governments towards their effort to address complex urban problems. This paper explores the significant role that cloud computing can play in helping cities on their way to become smart. We focus on the STORM CLOUDS paradigm as a solution for municipalities everywhere in order to (i) deploy a portfolio of smart cities applications related to governance, economy and quality of life on a single cloud-based platform and (ii) use the platform and its accompanied tools to migrate their existing applications to the cloud environment. Besides the conclusions from the STORM experience, the paper closes with a number of research trends and future challenges that are expected to define the adoption of cloud computing from municipalities and city governments in the following years

This paper describes our work on STORM CLOUDS[1], a project with the main objective of migrating smart-city services, that Public Authorities (PAs) currently provided using traditional Information Technology, to a cloud-based environment. Our organization was in charge of finding the technical solutions, so we designed and implemented a cloud computing solution called Storm Clouds Platform (SCP), for that purpose. In principle, the applications we ported could run on a public cloud service, like Amazon Web ServicesTM[2] or Microsoft® Azure[3], that provide computational resources on a pay-per-use paradigm. However, these solutions have disadvantages due to their proprietary nature: vendor lock-in is one of the issues but other serious problems are related to the lack of full control on how data and applications are processed in the cloud. As an example, when using a public cloud, the users of the cloud services have very little control on the location where applications run and data are stored, if there is any. This is identified as one of the most important obstacles in cloud computing adoption, particularly in applications manage personal data and the application provider has legal obligation of preserving end user privacy[4]. This paper explains how we faced the problem and the solutions we found. We designed a cloud computing platform — completely based on open software components — that can be used for either implementing private clouds or for porting applications to public clouds.

In this paper we present the RADICAL platform, a software stack that enables the combination of social network (SN) services and Internet of Things (IoT) in the context of innovative smart cities. RADICAL makes possible the development and deployment of interoperable pervasive multi-sensory and socially-aware services; facilitates smart governance and flexible replication of services across cities and regions through a Virtual Machine generation mechan-ism in a sophisticated cloud environment. A large scale piloting of the platform integrates, deploys and tests various services in the areas of Cycling Safety, Participatory Urbanism, Augmented Reality and others while a large group of citizens from different countries are actively involved in the co-creation, validation and evaluation of the RADICAL approach on the basis of an innovative Living Labs approach.

During the last decade, there has been an increased interest on cloud computing and especially on the adoption of public cloud services. The process of developing cloud-based public services or migrating existing ones to the Cloud is considered to be of particular interest—as it may require the selection of the most suitable applications as well as their transformation to fit in the new cloud environment. This paper aims at presenting the main findings of a migration process regarding smart city applications to a cloud infrastructure. First, it summarises the methodology along with the main steps followed by the cities of Agueda (Portugal), Thessaloniki (Greece) and Valladolid (Spain) in order to implement this migration process within the framework of the STORM CLOUDS project. Furthermore, it illustrates some crucial results regarding monitoring and validation aspects during the empirical application that was conducted via these pilots. These findings should be received as a helpful experience for future efforts designed by cities or other organisations that are willing to move their applications to the Cloud.

Social networking data threads emerge rapidly and such crowd-driven big data streams are valuable for detecting trends and opinions. For such analytics, conventional data mining approaches are challenged by both high-dimensionality and scalability concerns. Here, we leverage on the Cloud4Trends framework for collecting and analyzing geo-located microblogging content, partitioned into clusters under cloud-based infrastructures. Different cloud architectures are proposed to offer flexible solutions for geo-located data analytics with emphasis on incremental trend analysis. The proposed architectures are largely based on a set of service modules which facilitate the deployment of the experimentation on cloud infrastructures. Several experimentation remarks are highlighted to showcase the requirements and testing capabilities of different cloud computing settings.

Data security is a major concern in cloud computing environments as they provide much scope for intruders to attack. Data centres in cloud environments hold valid information that end-users would conventionally have stored on their computers. Moving information towards centralised services may have an adverse effect on the security of users’ interactions with files kept in cloud cupboard spaces[1], for example accidental or deliberate alterations or deletions of information from the cloud server by the Cloud Service Provider (CSP). This necessitates the deployment of some sort of mechanism to ensure the safety of information integrity[2]. Public sector organisations have much to gain by adopting a cloud computing approach to service delivery in their ICT environments. However, these benefits must be reaped without compromising core requirements and institutional values.
This paper focuses on the security issues that may arise when public sector organisations consider transitioning to an Open Source Software (OSS) Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Cloud Infrastructure (OpenStack), although the same issues are likely to be found in other OSS cloud computing software like Apache CloudStack[3], Eucalyptus[4], and OpenNebula[5]. We examine legal implications, regulatory and standards compliance, new attack vectors resulting from vulnerabilities coming from virtualisation technologies, data integrity issues such as encryption and access controls, and security checks to be performed on the services prior to their movement to the cloud. In addition, some of the most important security threats in cloud computing are presented, followed by key recommendations on how to address them, namely security standards and certifications, service provider auditing, secure APIs, transport layer protection, authentication and encryption key management, and cloud service agreements.