UBITECH has chaired the DIN SPEC 91337 technical committee, organized and supported by DIN (Deutsches Institut für Normung – German Institute for Standardization) that has finally created and published a global standard for managing and controlling the life cycle of an application that is executed in a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud provider.

The term PaaS provider is in line with the definition that is provided by NIST according to which a PaaS provider is a cloud provider that offers the “capability to the consumer to deploy onto the cloud infrastructure consumer-created or acquired applications created using programming languages and tools supported by the provider. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, or storage, but has control over the deployed applications and possibly application hosting environment configurations”. The term “life cycle” denotes all steps and administration functions that are required in order to manage an application starting from the submission of an application to the PaaS provider to the de-provision of an application. These steps and functions represent core services that have previously been offered to service users by Platform-as-a-Service providers as non-standardized, heterogeneous programming interfaces. The DIN SPEC 91337 is intended to provide a definition of these programming interfaces, thus maximizing the interoperability of Platform-as-a-Service-Solutions on the one hand and services and tools from third party vendors on the other hand. If adopted by the industry, the DIN SPEC 91337 could be the basis of a new, open and independent Platform-as-a-Service ecosystem.

The standard and publishable materials is provided in English and targeting international users. The package comes in two parts: 1. Normative and 2. Informative. Normative part is a written document of 24-30 pages, while the Informative part is the downloadable zip file including standardized APIs. For more info, please download the DIN SPEC brochure here.

Source: http://www.din.de/en/about-standards/din-spec-en/wdc-beuth:din21:267320824

UBITECH continues its successful participation in the H2020 EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, with the award of top ranked proposals at European level (ARCADIA, INPUT, PaaSword, FALCON, ENTROPY, SUBSOL, SAGE-CARE), as highlighted in a recent report published by the Greek National Documentation Centre (Greek National Contact Point for H2020), entitled “Greek Participation in the Information and Communication Technologies Programme of the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme, 2014-2015 Work Programme”. In particular, UBITECH ranks 5th among all Greek SMEs in the “top organizations by funding” list concerning the ICT related grants in 2014-2015. In particular, UBITECH has successfully participated in the following ICT related funded research projects (that are taken into account in the aforementioned EKT report): PaaSword, ARCADIA and INPUT. For your convenience, you can download the GNDC report (in Greek) here.

Source: http://metrics.ekt.gr/el/node/329

UBITECH invites you at the first industrial focus workshop of the PaaSword H2020 project on privacy-by-design and secure cloud technologies, entitled “No More Dark Clouds with the Data Privacy And Security By Design Platform-As-A Service”, which going to take place on November 10th, 2016 (10:00 – 15:00 Athens time) at the INNOVAATHENS – Hub of Innovation and Entrepreneurship Technopolis City of Athens.

Continue reading UBITECH co-hosts the first Industrial Focus Group Workshop of the PaaSword H2020 project on privacy-by-design and Cloud security technologies

UBITECH is proud to be awarded with the Best Demo Award at Cloud Forward Conference 2016 (held in Madrid, Spain) – based on the votes of all those who attended the demo session. In the course of the SME Event and Demonstrations session of Cloud Forward Conference 2016, UBITECH presented an interactive, live demonstration of the PaaSword data privacy and security by design platform-as-a-service framework.

Watch our video highlighting the main aspects of the demonstrator.

Source: http://cf2016.holacloud.eu

UBITECH performs an interactive, live demonstration of the ARCADIA Smart Controller (Orchestrator), coming along with a software development paradigm, tackling development, placement and orchestration of highly distributed applications over programmable multi-IaaS infrastructure – in the course of the SME Event and Demonstrations session of Cloud Forward Conference 2016 (held in Madrid, Spain).

Continue reading Demonstrating the orchestration of reconfigurable-by-design applications over programmable infrastructure at the CF2016 SME Event

In the course of the SME Event and Demonstrations session of Cloud Forward Conference 2016 (held in Madrid, Spain), UBITECH performs an interactive, live demonstration of the PaaSword data privacy and security by design platform-as-a-service framework. This innovative framework enhances advanced security in the next generation cloud applications by revolutionizing the cloud developers’ toolkit in order to protect them against internal and external adversaries. It enables security annotations, transparently in your IDE, transformed into context-aware security policies that enforce cryptographic protection and physical distribution for securing sensitive data.

Continue reading UBITECH demonstrates the innovative security-by-design PaaSword Framework at the CF2016 SME Event

At the Cloud Forward Conference 2016 (CF2016), held on October 18-20, at the Circulo de Bellas Artes, Madrid). UBITECH’s R&D team presents a context model for representing the entire lifecycle of reconfigurable-by-design distributed applications consisted of microservices and denoted in the form of a service graph. Based on the context model, we describe a policies management framework targeted at service providers for managing deployment and orchestration aspects of such applications over programmable infrastructure. As a matter of fact, the Policies Management Framework provides policies enforcement over the deployed service graphs following a continuous match-resolve-act approach. Specifically, the match phase regards the mapping of the set of applied rules that are satisfied based on the data streams coming from the monitoring infrastructure, the resolve phase regards the process of conflict resolution -if any- among the satisfied rules taking into account the pre-defined salience of each rule, while the act phase regards the provision of a set of suggested actions by the Policies Management Framework to the orchestrator, responsible for service graphs placement and management. Policies enforcement is realised through a rule-based framework that attempts to derive execution instructions based on the current set of data and the active rules; rules associated with the deployed service graphs over at each point of time.

Source: http://cf2016.holacloud.eu/programme/

A scientific paper entitled “Current and Future Challenges of Software Engineering for Services and Applications” has been co-authored by UBITECH and published at the Cloud Forward 2016 Conference that is going to be held in Madrid at 18-20 October, 2016. Given that ICT and, in particular, software is more and more pervasive and it cannot be considered anymore as a minor element of a complex system, there is a need to consolidate the software engineering discipline, which, despite the impressive achievements in the area of software technology, is probably one of the youngest scientific and technological disciplines with about 60 years of history. This paper summarizes the challenges that the Software Engineering for Services and Applications (SE4SA) cluster is considering as relevant. At this paper, UBITECH has actively contributed towards the collection and compilation of challenges dealt by the current European projects in Software Engineering (especially the “software design” and “software implementation and orchestration middleware” challenges), as well as the specification of future trends in the “privacy and security by design” software development era.

Source: http://cf2016.holacloud.eu/programme/

The PaaSword consortium successfully demonstrated the results of the first 18 months during the first project review on 30th of September at the European Commission in Brussels. These results included the first release (by UBITECH and INTRASOFT) of the PaaSword Framework – a holistic data privacy and security by design framework that helps to protect sensitive data in the cloud. This includes among others mechanisms for flexible context-aware access control and security policies, innovative encryption and data fragmentation as well as distributed key management. A plug-in for the cloud-based Eclipse Che IDE supports cloud developers to create secure cloud applications, allowing standardized security- and privacy- related annotations at code level. The committee of external reviewers have been quite enthusiastic about the results; especially about the live, end-to-end demo of the PaaSword platform that UBITECH presented, which they said to be “very impressive”.

Source: https://www.paasword.eu/2016/10/04/successful-1st-review-paasword

Co-authoring a research paper, entitled “Embedding Security and Privacy into the Development and Operation of Cloud Services”, with the Technical University Berlin and Fraunhofer FOKUS in Berlin, UBITECH participates in the 17th International Network Strategy and Planning Symposium (Networks 2016). Networks 2016 constitutes the 17th edition of a symposium held every two years which attracts participants from all over the world. Network operators, software designers, system integrators, researchers from universities and industry, marketers, regulators and policy-makers convene to present their latest findings and share experiences in network strategy, planning, operations, management, control and design. Networks 2016 is technically co-sponsored by IEEE Communications Society.

Dr. Anastasios Zafeiropoulos, Dr. Panagiotis Gouvas and their co-authors introduce an approach allowing Cloud application developers and service providers to consider security and privacy requirements across the application lifecycle. Specifically, a DevOps framework has been described that took into account several emerging technologies such as Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Microservice Pattern Design.

Source: http://networks2016.etsmtl.ca/technical.htm