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Cloud computing security is a broad research domain with a large number of concerns, ranging from protecting hardware and platform technologies to protecting clouds data and resource access (through different end-user devices). Although the advantages of cloud computing are tremendous, the security and privacy concerns of cloud computing have always been the focus of numerous cloud customers and impediment to its widespread adaptation by businesses and organizations. The paper presents a systematic literature review in the field of cloud computing with a focus on risk assessment. This would help future research and cloud users/business organizations to have an overview of the risk factors in a cloud environment. And to proactively map their indigenous needs with this technology. 2 Section 4 gives the detailed description of the reviewed papers. Section 5 shows the analysis of the systematic review, and finally the conclusion is presented in section 6.

As Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) gradually permeate daily life, they are profoundly changing the way education is conceived and delivered. Teachers play a key role in this transformation process; their beliefs, pedagogical practices, and teaching skills are continuously challenged. ICT integration in the educational process can significantly enhance traditional courses and Internet-based education, i.e., e-learning, is becoming a serious alternative to traditional, face-to-face courses. To be used as a lever for pedagogical innovation and institutional transformation, teacher ICT competencies need to go beyond skills in ICT use per se, and enclose contextual knowledge about technology, pedagogy, and content. On the other hand, learners' engagement with ICT in education depends on their expectations and conceptions of learning and required assessment. A learner's experience with ICT in education is linked to his perception of systems' ease of use and usefulness in achieving learning goals. Adaptive learning systems open new potentialities for a personalized instruction which is tailored to the learner's characteristics. At the edge of a new era, schools, colleges, and higher education struggle to seize opportunities and overcome obstacles.

Part 3: Governance, Openess and InstitutionsInternational audienceIntegrating Web 2.0 technologies in e-government opens up new opportunities for improving the quality of online public services and developing new ones, and can potentially contribute in achieving e-government strategic objectives. This paper presents and analyzes the result of an exploratory field study conducted recently with a group of e-government experts in France. Our objective is to identify e-government development trends, and to assess the transformation potential associated with Web 2.0 and Open Innovation (OI). We have adopted an enriched Delphi method, and used a GSS (Group Support System) to facilitate brainstorming and idea generation. Preliminary results are analyzed from two perspectives: Their contribution to e-government 2.0 and to open government, and their differences and complementarities with a recent governmental report on the future of public e-services in France. This work is a first step in a comprehensive research whose purpose is the study of public organizations’ transformation and the emergence of the government 2.0 concept. It is a contribution to a better understanding of e-government future

Cloud computing is a state-of-the-art technological innovation providing an extensive list of benefits for almost every business and governmental, small or medium-sized organizations. It has truly revolutionized the computational era by cutting down cost and reducing complexities of infrastructural configurations for computational platforms. This state-of-the-art technology is rapidly being adapted by various large organizations from healthcare to critical infrastructure to carry out their business processes that, otherwise, would require large storage capacity, huge computational power, and expensive hardware.On the other hand, this technological advent also introduces novel ways of information leakage and user classified data security and privacy issues since data is stored and transmitted over the cloud and even across borders. This seems very threatening to the cloud user's community, and they have raised very serious concerns about these issues. Although extensive research efforts have been carried out to address data security and privacy issues in cloud-assisted systems, this still requires many more efforts to counter these issues effectively.The purpose of this special issue was to arrange a venue for cloud researchers around the world to share their state-of-theart research and development that could benefit the cloud community. This helped collect high-quality articles that reported recent research advances regarding security and privacy issues in cloud computing, covering various topics of interest. We received 26 articles, and each article was rigorously reviewed by at least three experts. Finally, we selected 11 articles for publication. The brief descriptions of the selected articles are presented below.The paper entitled BService resizing for quick DDoS mitigation in cloud computing environment^by Gaurav Somani, Manoj Singh Gaur, Dheeraj Sanghi, Mauro Conti, and Rajkumar Buyya presents important metrics to evaluate the performance of a DDoS mitigation process in the cloud computing environment [1]. The authors propose a novel framework consisting of an affinity-based victim-service resizing algorithm to provide performance isolation and a TCPtuning technique to quickly free the attack connections, hence minimizing the attack cooling down period. Extensive real attack experiments show a significant improvement in the performance of the DDoS mitigation service, providing quick attack mitigation.The paper entitled BAn empirical study on acceptance of secure healthcare service in Malaysia, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia: a mobile cloud computing perspective^by Rooh ul Amin, Irum Inayat, Basit Shahzad, Kashif Saleem, and Li Aijun conducted an empirical study to investigate the behavioral intention of healthcare organizations' staff towards the usage of cloud-based healthcare services to carry out their daily jobs in Malaysia, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia [2]. The results showed that social influence was the least influencing predictor in determining the dependent variable and that the years of experience pos...

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have emerged as a promising technology that has shown enormous potential in improving the quality of healthcare, and has thus found a broad range of medical applications from ubiquitous health monitoring to emergency medical response systems. The huge amount of highly sensitive data collected and generated by WBAN nodes requires an ascendable and secure storage and processing infrastructure. Given the limited resources of WBAN nodes for storage and processing, the integration of WBANs and cloud computing may provide a powerful solution. However, despite the benefits of cloud-assisted WBAN, several security issues and challenges remain. Among these, data availability is the most nagging security issue. The most serious threat to data availability is a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that directly affects the all-time availability of a patient's data. The existing solutions for standalone WBANs and sensor networks are not applicable in the cloud. The purpose of this review paper is to identify the most threatening types of DDoS attacks affecting the availability of a cloud-assisted WBAN and review the state-of-the-art detection mechanisms for the identified DDoS attacks.

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