Sharif Digital Repository

Due to the strategic importance of IT, there exists an undeniable need for a systematic analysis before deciding whether or not a particular IT process should be outsourced. A study that provides a systematic analysis for evaluating components of the company's IT for outsourcing may be useful to practitioners. In this research, analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is proposed as a suitable technique for analyzing information systems outsourcing decision. An IT outsourcing case is used to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed approach. "Super Decisions" is used to implement the AHP  

One of the security issues in data outsourcing scenario is the enforcement of data owner’s access control policies. This includes three challenges; 1) the average number of keys needed to access authorized resources, 2) efficient update of policies, and 3) confidentiality of data owner’s access control policies. Most of the existing proposed solutions address only one of these challenges, while they impose high overhead on both the data owner and users. Such an overhead prevents the model to be implemented in practical applications. In this thesis, we propose an approach to address all the aforementioned challenges with acceptable overhead. In this approach, which is based on selective... 

Decreasing cost, enhancing quality, increasing the customer satisfaction and the productivity to gain farther market shares are among the reasons for urging the companies to outsource their needs. In this study the definition of outsourcing, its advantages and weaknesses and the risks associated with it are presented and then models for decision making on outsourcing and its implementation process are discussed. As a scope for this mention, then the evaluation of outsourcing procedures for the paint shops is selected and studied. A model for the case is also presented. The case study is undertaken in Iran Khodro's paint shop during the years: 1379 – 1384 as a practical case. We can summarize... 

Regarding to globalization concept, all companies around the world can communicate with each other, share their technologies and also compensate their production deficiencies. To achieve this goal, cloud manufacturing system have been proposed and investigated. One of the most important issues in cloud manufacturing is focusing on the service composition, in which a composition of cloud services is determined to meet customer demands. Also due to the distribution of the resources in the different points and geographic locations, considering to the production and routing which previously have been studied in the classical space is very important. Considering this, the problem is as follows:... 

With the development of science and technology and its application in IT (e.g. internet, intranet and URL) the sharing of manufacturing resources reaches higher research attention, where resource virtualization enables new possibilities in terms of collaboration. As a result of these changes, with the intention of sharing optimum allocation of cloud manufacturing resource and capability among service providers and service users, the concept of service composition was introduced. Cloud services can be combine to build virtual manufacturing chain, so a strategy focusing on the evaluation and selection of virtual manufacturing resources to fulfill given services is fundamental exercise to... 

Cloud Manufacturing is a new paradigm which under development and has been introduced as one of the promising models for providing ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable manufacturing resources (e.g, networks, servers, facilities, applications, robots, machines and services) that can be rapidly provisioned with minimal management effort and service provider’s interaction. Cloud Manufacturing is defined based on Cloud Computing. Like the Cloud Computing, Cloud Manufaturing offers a service-oriented architecture that is based on information technology (IT) in which each manufacturing resources is expressed as a service. For providing a... 

In the secure data outsourcing scenario, verification of the reply of an unreliable server includes assessing the authenticity, completeness and it’s integrity. In this thesis, an efficient method, with emphasis on freshness, has been introduced to evaluate the correctness of the replies from a server. It takes in hand different application needs, inherent differences in the data, and different update mechanisms. This method evaluates freshness by using timestamps alongside the data being out sourced. Due to the requirement of verifying not only the freshness of the response, but the correctness of the timestamps as well, two general methods for evaluating and verifying the responses were... 

One of the security issues in database outsourcing scenario is the correctness of the query results. Correctness verification includes integrity, completeness and freshness of the results. Most of the proposed approaches for correctness verification impose high overhead on the components of the scenario which prevents the scenario to implemented in practical applications. In this thesis, we have proposed a probabilistic approach which imposes acceptable overhead for correctness verification of returned results of service provider. The approach uses the previous behavior of the service provider to calculate a trust value toward it which is used to adjust the imposed overhead. In other words,... 

Outsourcing is currently a challenging issue in the auto industry. On one hand, outsourcing has be-come a competitive imperative for automakers due to its significant benefits. On the other hand, it involves many aspects of risks that could potentially hurt core competencies of a firm. As such, in the auto industry, it is highly critical to make optimal outsourcing decisions for which an integrated framework offering a holistic view seems quite necessary. In this thesis, based on four fundamental research questions of “Who?”, “What?”, “Whom?” and “How?”, an integrated framework for outsourcing in the auto industry is developed in order to identify effective outsourcing factors and associated... 

Dynamic searchable encryption schemes enable keyword search query and update operations on encrypted data. One of their applications is to use them in cloud storage services that allow the client to store, search and update data on an external server. Due to the importance of efficiency in real-world applications, retrieving information in searchable schemes involves leakage of some information such as search and access patterns. However, with the addition of update operations (insertion and deletion), more leakages are considered for these schemes. In this regard, reducing the amount of information disclosed to the server is necessary. For this purpose, forward and backward security... 

Data outsourcing is an approach to delegate the burden of data management to external servers. In spite of its clear advantages, data outsourcing requires security assurances including data confidentiality, query result correctness, and access control enforcement. Research proposals have identified solutions with disparate assumptions for different security requirements. It is a real obstacle towards having an integrated solution through the combination of existing approaches. The practicality of data outsourcing to the cloud is seriously affected by this challenge. In this thesis, a unified view based on secret sharing is proposed to simultaneously achieve confidentiality, correctness, and... 

While data outsourcing provides some benefits, it suffers from new privacy and security concerns, mainly about the confidentiality and integrity of the stored sensitive data, as well as enforcing access control policies. Current solutions to these aims are not comprehensive and consider only one aspect of security requirements. A secure DBMS architecture is introduced that simultaneously considers confidentiality, integrity and access control enforcement requirements. The transparency of security functions from data owner, service providers, and applications facilitates the operationality of the solution.Additionally, a new indexing technique for character encrypted data is proposed that... 

Recently, many organizations outsource their data on an external server to rescue the trouble of data maintenance. But, data owners do not trust in the external server to enforce defined access control policies. In recent years, many researches was dedicated to cryptographic access control on outsourced data, in order to solve this problem. We introduce a method based on Attribute-based Encryption to enforce access control on outsourced data. In this method we consider policy updating and administrative access control. As a result The owner is not only able to change access control policies on outsourced data but also to define administrative rights (grant/revoke) for some admin users. Our...