The first international workshop on dependability of clouds, data centers and virtual computing environments: DCDV 2011

Cloud computing can be characterized as the culmination of the integration of computing and data infrastructures to provide a scalable, agile and cost-effective approach to support the ever-growing critical IT needs (in terms of computation and storage) of both enterprises and the general public. Cloud computing introduces a paradigm shift in computing where the ownership of computing resources is no more necessary for businesses and individuals to provide services to their end-users over the Internet. Cloud computing relieves its users from the burdens of provisioning and managing their own data centers and allows them to pay for resources only when they are actually needed and used. However, a shared cloud infrastructure introduces a number of new dependability challenges both for the cloud providers and users. Indeed all the data gets created, stored, shared and manipulated within the cloud. © 2011 IEEE