Adoption of cloud computing by SMEs and public sector

SMEs and public sector organizations are increasingly wanting to use cloud computing services in their everyday business. However, accessing services and resources in the cloud on-demand and in a flexible and elastic way could result in significant cost savings due to more efficient and convenient resource utilization that also replaces large investment costs with long-term operational costs.

On the other hand, the take-up of cloud computing by SMEs and the public sector is still relatively low due to limited application-level flexibility and also security concerns. The Cloud Orchestration at the Level of Application (COLA) project aims to increase the adoption of cloud computing services by the above two strategic target communities. Typical industry and public sector applications require resource scalability and efficient resource utilization in order to serve a variable number of customers with dynamic resource demands.

However, the dynamic and intelligent utilization of cloud infrastructure resources from the perspective of cloud applications is not trivial. The overall objective of the COLA project is that by building on and extending current research results, it will define and provide a reference implementation of a generic and pluggable framework that supports the optimal and secure deployment and run-time orchestration of cloud applications. COLA will demonstrate the applicability and impact of the solution via large-scale near operational level SME and public sector pilot studies.

The project also has a special interest in developing deadline-scheduling services for simulation, a technique widely used in the public sector and industry.

Partners

• Professor Tamas Kiss (University of Westminster, Project Lead)
• MTA SZTAKI (Hungary )
• Cloudbroker GMBH (Switzerland)
• Scaletools AG (Switzerland)
• SICS (Sweden)
• Cloudsigma (Switzerland)
• BALABIT (Hungary)
• INYCOM (Spain)
• SARGA (Spain)
• Outlandish LLP (UK)
• Saker Solutions (UK)
• CloudSME UG (Germany)

Publications

• Kiss, T., DesLauriers, J., Gesmier, G., Terstyanszky, G., Pierantoni, G., Abu Oun, O., Taylor, S.J.E., Anagnostou, A., Kovacs, J. (2019). A cloud-agnostic queuing system to support the implementation of deadline-based application execution policies. Future Generation Computer Systems, 101: 99-111.
• Taylor, S.J.E. Distributed Simulation: State-of-the-Art and Potential for Operational Research. (2019). European Journal of Operational Research. 273(1):1-19. 
• Anagnostou, A., Taylor, S.J.E., Abubakar, N., Kiss, T., DesLauriers, J., Gesmier, G., Terstyanszky, G., Kacsuk, P. and Kovacs, J. (2019) “Towards a Deadline-Based Simulation Experimentation Framework Using Micro-Services Auto-Scaling Approach.” In Proceedings of the 2019 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC19), Edited by N. Mustafee, K.-H.G. Bae, S. Lazarova-Molnar, M. Rabe, C. Szabo, P. Haas, and Y-J. Son, Invited, Maryland, December 8-11.

Meet the Principal Investigator(s) for the project

Professor Simon Taylor - imon J E Taylor is a Professor of Computer Science specialising in Modelling & Simulation and Digital Infrastructures.  He has made many contributions to manufacturing, health care and international development.  He has worked with international consortia (in particular UNICT, WACREN and the UBUNTUNET ALLIANCE) to contribute to the development of National Research and Education Networks in Africa that has impacted over 3 million students and 300 universities. He has also worked with international consortia (in particular Saker Solutions, the University of Westminster, SZTAKI and CloudSME UG) to develop high performance simulation systems that are being used by over 30 European SMEs and large-scale enterprises such as the Ford Motor Company and Sellafield PLC.  He continues to work closely with industry - his work has led to over £30M of savings and new products in industry.  He also contributes to the development of Open Science principles and practice for Africa and for Modelling & Simulation as a field.   He has led modules in distributed computing in the Department of Computer Science for many years with high module evaluations scores and is an enthusiastic teacher.  He has also led the development of several postgraduate degrees.  He has supervised over 20 doctoral students, has examined more than 25 doctoral students from across the world and has managed over 15 research fellows. Professor Taylor co-founded and is a former Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Simulation and the UK Operational Research Society Simulation Workshop Series.  He chaired ACM SIGSIM between 2005-2008 and since then has been an active member of the ACM SIGSIM Steering Committee. He is also the General Chair for the 2025 Winter Simulation Conference. He has chaired international standardisation groups under the Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization and has conducted several organisational review panels (e.g., DSTL) and simulation audits. He is currently the executive chair for the annual Simulation Exploration Experience (https://www.exploresim.com/) and a member of the Computer Simulation Archive steering committee (https://d.lib.ncsu.edu/computer-simulation/).  He has also chaired several conferences and is the General Chair for the IEEE/ACM 2025 Winter Simulation Conference. Interested in the history of computer simulation?  Visit the Computer Simulation Archive hosted by NCSU and hear talks from some of the pioneers in computer simulation.

Related Research Group(s)

Modelling and Simulation - Investigating how modelling and simulation can be supported by research into high-performance computing, e-infrastructures, cyberinfrastructures, cloud computing and web-based simulation.

Project last modified 02/10/2023