Prof. Elhadj Benkhelifa

Elhadj Benkhelifa is a Professor of Computer Science at Staffordshire University, UK/ He is the founding head of Cloud Computing and Applications Research Lab and the Research Lead for REF (Research Excellence Framework) for Computing and Informatics Unit of Assessment. Before that (2014-2016) Elhadj was the Faculty Director of the Mobile Fusion Applied Research Centre (45 PhD students and 15+ Staff). Elhadj has published 120+ research papers in journals, conferences and book chapters and edited a number of conference proceedings and jounals’ special issues. He is the co-founder or number of successful IEEE international conferences and workshops. Elhadj’s research interest covers Artificial Life and biologically inspired systems, Cloud Computing including security and resilience, Mobile Cloud, Software Defined Systems, Cloud Forensics, IOT and Cloud, Fog and Mobile Edge Computing. Elhadj is also a Director at Yotta Laboratories Ltd and a Senior R&D Advisor to a number of companies in the UK.

Title: Towards Bio-Inspired Resilient Cloud Environments

Abstract
As Organisations are increasingly adopting cloud-computing (centralised and/or decentralised) as the foundation for their IT infrastructure, the reliability of inherently complex cloud systems becomes under test. The robustness of these infrastructures and services and the overall resilience is, generally, enhanced by creating redundancy for backup in times of fault, failure or attack. Concepts and processes existing as nature's inherently multifunctional capabilities such as robustness, resiliency, survivability, and adaptability, could provide inspiration for unconventional methods to solve unique problems in the computing continuum. Ensuring the resilience of critical infrastructures is ever more necessary with the increasing threat of cyber-attacks, due to the increased complexity. It is generally acceptable that whilst complexity increases resilience and reliability decreases. However Biological systems subvert this rule; they are inherently much more complex, yet highly reliable. This talk will review and define resilience disciplines and techniques for cloud computing, then draws parallels between resilience capabilities in nature such as those demonstrated in multi-cellular biological systems and capabilities in cloud environments.