* Private Virtual Infrastructure (PVI) and Locator Bot

Also addressing the security and confidentiality issues surrounding cloud computing is University of Maryland, Baltimore County researcher John Krautheim. His proposal is aimed at better sharing the risk responsibility between the cloud provider and customer, giving the customer much more control than is typically the case. "A method of combining the requirements of the user and provider is to let the clients control the security posture of their applications and virtual machines while letting the service provider control the security of the fabric. This provides a symbiotic security stance that can be very powerful provided both parties hold up their end of the agreement," Krautheim writes. He adds that this setup calls for big-time trust on both sides (including support for a virtualized Trusted Platform Module, or TPM, for storing cryptographic keys), since they'll need to share security information between themselves and possibly with others. Components of this approach will include having a method for shutting down VMs if necessary and monitoring/auditing from within and outside the PVI, Krautheim writes in a paper titled "Private Virtual Infrastructure for Cloud Computing."

* Trading storage for computation

One way to make cloud computing more efficient and cost effective might involve rethinking the way data is stored. Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, NetApp and Pergamum Systems are looking at the trade-offs between storing data, including data that might not be called on that often, and simply recalculating results as needed. In a paper titled "Maximizing Efficiency By Trading Storage for Computation" the researchers write: "Recomputation as a replacement for storage fits well into the holistic model of computing described by the cloud architecture. With its dynamically scalable, and virtualized architecture, cloud computing aims to abstract away the details of underlying infrastructure. In both public and private clouds, the user is encouraged to think in terms of services, not structure."

Determining the best way to store and retrieve data requires a cost-benefits analysis based on insights from both the cloud operator and the data user because "neither has a completely informed view," the researchers write. They argue that the nature of cloud computing, with its dynamically allocated computing resources, could lend itself to storing information about the whereabouts and origins of data and then just recomputing results as needed. But they acknowledge that this sort of system would require forecasting where prices would be headed and figuring out things such as the cost of not being able to immediately access data.