Knowledge Management in Cloud Environments

Dirk Langenberg
Pumacy Technologies AG Bartningallee 27 Berlin, Germany +49 30 2216128-0

Christian Kind
Pumacy Technologies AG Bartningallee 27 Berlin, Germany +49 30 2216128-0

Martin Dames
Pumacy Technologies AG Bartningallee 27 Berlin, Germany +49 30 2216128-0

dirk.langenberg@pumacy.de

christian.kind@pumacy.de

martin.dames@pumacy.de

ABSTRACT
Communication and sharing of knowledge are important challenges for virtual organizations (VO) in the globalized economy. There are various tools available to virtually reduce geographical distances and to support collaboration. Also for the management of knowledge appropriate solutions are available. But VOs typically have limited time to setup the entire ITinfrastructure for their collaboration. Therefore the trend to buy ready-to-use products exists. This paper characterizes requests of VOs for SaaS products, proposes functionalities to support team work and describes challenges with their solutions in the cloud.

Categories and Subject Descriptors

H.3.5 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: On-line Information Services Commercial services, Data sharing, Web-based services C.2.4 [Distributed Systems]: Distributed applications Cloud Computing

Today, various collaboration platforms are established for VOs [5], which provide file management typically. For knowledgeintensive works this is not enough. In VOs the members require more capabilities to collect, manage and provide knowledge for its reuse in the joint projects [14]. Sharing of experiences in VOs is mostly done by direct communication without any KM system. Preferred solutions to exchange files are project servers. However, even here are some remaining challenges: Firstly, project servers have to be accessible by all project members via the Internet. In many companies security policies hinder operation of such services. Secondly, project servers require hardware and software investments, administration and support. Often these costs cannot be specified for each project partner. Thirdly, the whereabouts of data and the possible access by end of project must be regulated. Additionally, VOs have limited time to setup and to operate an adequate infrastructure. Therefore a ready-to-use solution of a specialized provider is required, which can be bought and used instantly. The announcements of the arising cloud computing providers sound promising. This paper proposes a solution for a collaborative KM platform based on the new cloud technologies.

General Terms
Management

2. SUPPORTING FUNCTIONALITIES
Collaborative KM software has to meet several challenges to support VOs [8]. At first, communication between project members has to be facilitated to overcome geographical and cultural distances. After that, simplified and effective sharing of knowledge has to be enabled. Last but not least, management of the collaboration environment has to be simplified. Figure 1 shows the main functionalities to support VOs.

Keywords
knowledge management, virtual organizations, cloud computing, software as a service.

1. COLLABORATION IN INDUSTRY
In industry, virtual organizations (VO) are a common strategy to organize the development, production and maintenance of products. Most companies concentrate on their core competences and draw additional services from subcontractors. VOs are temporary consortiums of companies that work together with a common goal [2]. Therefore cross company collaborations are inevitable [11], but knowledge management (KM) stops at organizational borders, today. It is almost impossible to achieve sharing of knowledge between various parties in these VOs. Reasons for this are geographic distances, affiliation to different organizations and often the resulting formal flow of information. Also security policies hinder direct access to knowledge.

Figure 1. Functionalities for support of VOs [8]

When we take a look at the communication aspects, we see at first current Web 2.0 communication technologies (Twitter, blogs and RSS). Especially the internet-based VOs ask for integration of these tools into their collaboration environment. These tools reduce the distance between the partners virtually and enable more discussions. Of course, traditional communication tools like email are still required. One approach for more interaction inside of VOs in the context of collaborative KM is to deploy workflows. They might enforce reviews for knowledge articles before publication, involve more people in the creation process and ensure a higher quality level of documented knowledge. However, workflows formalize the KM process. So they have to be implemented adequate to the behavior in the VO. Of course, there are other ways to assist interaction between VO members with further collaboration functionalities. For example, common calendars and task management support the planning; tools for surveys and voting assist to form opinions. Regarding KM, software has to support collection, structuring and provision of knowledge. Lessons Learned, FAQs, Yellow Pages and ideas are typical knowledge articles. A comfortable search function has to make this knowledge reusable for other people. There are different approaches for KM, for example semistructured wikis or management systems for structured knowledge articles. Independent of the chosen approach, cross links between all knowledge items are important. There are explicit links to describe connections between knowledge items, which are set by authors. On the other side, there are various implicit links: Categories, tags, or meta information like creation time express correlations about the background of an article. To improve the management of VOs, technical barriers have to be solved. Typically, all members of a project and respectively of a VO are interested in the project specific topics and not in running an information technology infrastructure. Therefore a ready-to-use solution of a specialized provider is required. Then the entire group can focus their efforts on the joint project.

4. COLLABORATIVE KM AS A SERVICE
The proposed solution is to provide a project-based KM and collaboration service in the Cloud. It can be used worldwide by all project partners. Thereby VOs can establish an own KM environment for the duration of cooperation without having to invest into and maintain an own technical infrastructure. At the same time, the availability is much higher than most companies would typically achieve hosting the system locally. The usage of a common KM service by all partners simplifies capturing and retrieving of knowledge. The knowledge base can be extended by new articles comfortably and work processes of each project team member can be assisted by deploying existing knowledge. This is neither limited to specific companies nor with respect to time. However, the challenges here lie more in the legal situation regarding intellectual property rights to be respected. With such KM service all involved disciplines share their knowledge throughout the entire product lifecycle process. Beginning in the early stages, when requirements and their effects on the product are defined, until the usage and disposal phase, the product and process knowledge is documented in the cloud. One advantage is that anyone can use the service without disciplinespecific knowhow. Usage of a common platform avoids media breaks and ensures the location and system-independent information delivery. Based on the demand-oriented settlement, project partners will participate fairly in the costs. As long as the data is provided, the costs are borne by the partners. If the service is no longer needed, the data is deleted. Regarding faith in secure access to data during and after the project, a neutral service provider can often make arrangements easier. Project partners have to trust in the service provider in equal measure.

5. KNOWLEDGECLOUD 5.1 Description of the KM-Service KMcloud

As shown above the current trend providing SaaS is interesting for VOs and medium sized companies. They can buy required IT functionalities including setup, operation and maintenance. The KM service KMcloud by Pumacy Technologies is such a SaaS solution for collaboration-oriented KM, which is currently developed in the research project KnowledgeCloud [13]. KMcloud is a solution with a new architecture based on cloud technologies (Figure 2) and on the platform KMmaster [12].

3. CLOUD COMPUTING AS SOLUTION

Currently arising cloud computing technologies are a new form of virtualization in computing platforms. It is a further development of grid computing, which FOSTER defined as: Grid Computing is concerned with coordinated resource sharing and problem solving in dynamic, multi-institutional virtual organizations. [3] Grid solutions are mainly used to provide computing power and storage capacity for calculation and simulation tasks [7] [15]. Cloud computing shares the same vision [4]. In cloud environments, users purchase IT-infrastructure for a freely defined time period. For example, they rent virtualized Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform (hardware and basic software) as a Service (PaaS) or Software as a Service (SaaS). With these new solutions, any company can create its IT-environment. Especially the current trend to provide SaaS on a pay-per-use basis is interesting for VOs. They can buy the required IT-solution including (virtualized) hardware, setup, operation and maintenance (backups and security patches). Just a few years ago, outsourcing of applications with confidential information was not made because of security reasons. KM systems were installed only in the company, because they store important contributions to the intellectual property of companies. The demand to outsource IT-solutions forces the realization of cloud-based services. But security requirements remain.

Figure 2. KM as a service on basis of Cloud technologies [8]

In KnowledgeCloud concepts for scalable integration of external IT resources (computing, storage, DBs, etc.) from a cloud are in the foreground. The development is based on the described functionalities (chapter 2) and the requirements of the application scenario above (chapter 4). The next chapters present solutions for the most relevant challenges in the cloud environment.

5.2 Data Security

Security of their data and documents is perhaps the most important requirement of users in the cloud [9]. And there are still several challenges [6,16]. Therefore it is important for the success of a SaaS provider to fulfill the demand for adequate security. Regarding infrastructure and operating system, there are limited possibilities for KMcloud to enforce data security. Here, the service provider can only configure the basis software in a secure way and install updates regularly. Therefore, the focus of a SaaS provider regarding data security and safety is on the application itself. It can be summarized in the following activities and concepts: Encrypted connections prevent the interception of data. This ensures confidentiality and integrity of data. For all data outside of the KMcloud service (e.g. backups) strong encryption methods have to be used. A community concept ensures confidentiality of data. Every customer has its own community and does not see any data of other communities. Regular backups in defined periods and processes achieve safety of the service against data loss. After the contract ends, all data of a customer has to be deleted from the KMcloud database. Optional private cloud solutions increase security against access by third parties. Here, customers use their own KM service and do not share any resources with any other client.

Figure 3. Database Architecture

5.3.3 File Storage in the Cloud

Another service used for KMcloud is a file based cloud storage. Such storage is optimized for scalability and safety against data loss. KMcloud uses such cloud storage directly as data vault for big data sets (e.g. attached files) and as a backup service for all user and system data. Of course, for backups a second provider should be used, because even in the improbable case something could fail.

5.3.4 Availability
KMcloud is based on the existing KMmaster platform, which requires a specific application server. As a consequence, KMcloud cannot use solutions of the cloud providers for scalability and load balancing. Instead it has to realize this on its own by clustering application servers which could run on many instances in parallel. To have a high availability system it must be possible that if one cluster node crashes another node is able to serve client requests immediately. For this, the user session has to be distributed all the time over the whole cluster like it is shown in Figure 4.

5.3 Architecture and Availability

5.3.1 Overview
Basis of every KMcloud instance is a typical J2EE application with four layers. On server side, there is on the lowest layer a database. The business logic is implemented in Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) and the creation of web pages is realized in Java Servlet Pages (JSP). Both, EJBs and JSPs are running in the context of an application server, which is the container of the entire application. On client side, users access the application with an Internet web browser.

5.3.2 Database in the Cloud

Some cloud providers offer simple NoSQL databases [10]. These databases are extremely fast, scalable and cheap even with huge datasets. Unfortunately they are not compliant with the SQL standard so it is not possible to use them with existing applications. KMcloud uses the Hibernate framework which understands many different SQL Dialects but no cloud database dialects. Due to this, KMcloud uses a SQL server at the moment. This has many disadvantages like lower scalability. Therefore a JDBC driver is currently developed in KnowledgeCloud to create an interface between Hibernate and a NoSQL cloud database (see Figure 3). As cloud databases are not optimized for this type of usage, first results show that single database requests are much slower than in a relational database. But we expect that many concurrent requests will show a better relative performance. Figure 4. System Architecture & Communication Paths Now it is possible to add more computing resources with just adding a new cluster node to the system. On the other hand money can be saved by turning off unused nodes. There are different possibilities, each with their own advantages and disadvantages: a. Manual node management: A node is added (or removed) "by hand" to the system. This approach is suitable if the system load is nearly constant or easy predictable. Semi-automatic node management: At fixed points in time, when higher load is expected nodes are added (e.g. in the morning) or removed (e.g. at weekends) from the cluster.

b.

c.

Automatic node management: The cluster decides internally if nodes are added or removed. This approach is very complex because many parameters have to be taken into account.

8. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The presented results with respect to the KM service KMcloud have partly been developed during the project KnowledgeCloud. This project is co-funded by the German Government (BMWi, EP101090) and supervised by EuroNorm GmbH.

5.3.5 Load Balancing

To distribute the user request between the several KMcloud instances a load balancer is needed. It could be booked as a cloud service but this will result in further charges. Because a load balancer for a few nodes is fairly easy to setup there is no need to use a billed service for that. Each node receives its requests from a load balancer. There are various optimization approaches available to optimize load balancing [1]. To lower the inner cluster communication the load balancer keeps track of sessions so a subsequent request will be sent to the node which already has the affected session data. So session replication appears as little as possible. To avoid that the load balancer is a single point of failure it's started on every node but only one is used. In case the active load balancer drops out it can easily be replaced by a load balancer on another node. The whole system except the database is redundant that any component of it could drop out and nearly no impact on the whole service is noticeable. It is also very high scalable. To enhance the availability of the system further, nodes for fallbacks can be started in additional locations of other IaaS providers.

9. REFERENCES
[1] Bryhni, H., Klovning, E. and Kure, O. 2000. A comparison of load balancing techniques for scalable Web servers. IEEE Network 14, 4, 58-64. [2] Dryndos, J., Kazi, A.S., Langenberg, D., Lh, H., and Stark, R. 2008. Collaborative Virtual Engineering for SMEs: Technical Architecture. In Proceedings of 14th International Conference on Concurrent Enterprising (ICE), 507514. [3] Foster, I., Kesselman, C., and Tuecke, S. 2001. The anatomy of the grid: Enabling scalable virtual organizations. International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications 15, 3, 200-222. [4] Foster, I., Zhao, Y., Raicu, I., and Lu, S. 2008. Cloud Computing and Grid Computing 360-Degree Compared. In IEEE Grid Computing Environments Workshop 2008, 1-10. [5] Hayka, H., Langenberg, D., and Stark, R. 2010. Kooperationsplattformen fr virtuelle Unternehmen. ZWF Zeitschrift fr wirtschaftlichen Fabrikbetrieb 105, 7-8, 693699. [6] Kaufman, L.M. 2010. Can Public-Cloud Security Meet Its Unique Challenges? IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine 8, 4, 55-57. [7] Krause, F.-L., Hayka, H., Grtner, H., and Langenberg, D. 2004. Potenziale der Grid-Technologie in der Produktentwicklung. ZWF Zeitschrift fr wirtschaftlichen Fabrikbetrieb 99, 9, 500504. [8] Langenberg, D. and Welker, M. 2011. Knowledge management in virtual communities. Open Journal of Knowledge Management 3, 13-19. [9] Leavitt, N. 2009. Is Cloud Computing Really Ready for Prime Time? Computer 42, 1 (January 2009), 15-21. [10] Leavitt, N. 2010. Will NoSQL Databases Live Up to Their Promise? Computer 43, 2(February 2010), 12-14. [11] Lu, S.C.-Y., Elmaraghy, W., Schuh, G., and Wilhelm, R. 2007. A Scientific Foundation of Collaborative Engineering. CIRP Annals - Manufacturing Technology 56, 2, 605-634. [12] Pumacy Technologies AG, 2011. Website about KMmaster. www.kmmaster.com. [13] Pumacy Technologies AG, 2011. Website about KMcloud. www.kmcloud.de. [14] Stark, R., Krause, F.-L., Kind, C., et al. 2010. Competing in engineering design -The role of Virtual Product Creation. CIRP Journal of Manufacturing Science and Technology 3, 3, 184-175. [15] Stark, R., Hayka, H., and Langenberg, D. 2009. New potentials for virtual product creation by utilizing grid technology. CIRP Annals - Manufacturing Technology 58, 1, 143-146. [16] Takabi, H., Joshi, J.B.D., and Ahn, G.-J. 2010. Security and Privacy Challenges in Cloud Computing Environments. IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine 8, 6, 24-31.

6. REALIZED SYSTEM
The development in the project KnowledgeCloud is accomplished in two main phases. In the first phase, a pilot environment with basic functionalities is developed. After that, several enhancements will be added until the end of the project. The rollout of KMcloud (www.kmcloud.de) will be in the near future with the following key functionalities: KMcloud service is operating in a cloud environment and is accessible from the Internet. KMcloud provides functionalities to collect, structure, manage and provide knowledge. Configuration of knowledge templates is available for every customer. The service core scales flexible. The service core supports multi-tenancy.

7. CONCLUSIONS
With the SaaS-System KMcloud project partners are able to share their relevant knowledge across organizational boundaries easily. The service needs almost no set-up time and can be used as long as the collaboration in the VO continues. Thus, the staffs can focus their work on high quality results of the collaborative project. The necessary knowledge is structured, managed and provided for the use by the whole project team. From the view of the provider, the KMcloud service makes use of various cloud resources. Therefore it scales flexible and can be used for a single client or for hundreds of VOs. Application nodes and data storage are allocated dynamically based on the requests. Service providers like Pumacy Technologies benefit from the new cloud technologies. They change into complete solution providers (software + service) and reach new markets around the world.