CuteCloud - Putting "Credit union" cloud computing into practice

While cloud computing claims many advantages over prior computing paradigms such as high performance computing and grid computing, the Credit Union (CU) Cloud Computing Model [3] furthers many of the claimed advantages and tries to circumvent the inherent concern of human consumers for security and privacy with today's clouds due to lack of direct control. The key point of the CU Model lies in its fundamental principle - utilizing the vast, under-utilized computing resources (CPU cycles, memory, disc space, etc.) in labs, offices and homes, and transforming them into selfprovisioned community/organization-owned clouds mimicking the business model of Credit Unions in the financial industry. Such built clouds, called Credit Union clouds or CU clouds for short, bear greater advantages, e.g., vendor independence, improved availability (due to reduced Internetdependence), and increased resource utilization. This paper reports an on-going project, named CuteCloud, that aims at putting the CU Model into practice, delivering a framework accompanied with a suite of tools in order to be used by any community/organization to quickly setup its selfprovisioned, secure, and community/organization-owned (and typically on-premise) clouds.