This chapter provides a general introduction to cloud networking, services, and management. It also provides an overview of cloud computing, describing its key driving forces, characteristics and enabling technologies. The chapter focuses on the different characteristics of cloud computing systems and keyresearch challenges. It also compares cloud computing with other parallel and distributed computing models and highlights their differences. There are several driving forces behind the success of cloud computing.

The increasing demand for large-scale computation and big data analytics and economics are the most important ones. Generally speaking, the architecture of a cloud computing environment can be divided into four layers: the hardware/datacenter layer, the infrastructure layer, the platform layer, and the application layer. Cloud computing employs a service-driven business model. The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) has conducted a survey on the adaption of the cloud computing model by small to medium enterprises (SMEs).

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