Use Case 1 – Secure Storage
This use case focuses on providing secure and high-performance storage and sharing of various data types at the edge of the network. In particular, SERRANO aims to break the typical trade-off between security and performance, by utilizing a combination of multiple edge locations and even multiple cloud computing and storage services/providers. Providing security and privacy guarantees for storing various types of data, e.g., IoT sensors, video, images, at the edge is critical for enabling the development of new applications, while ensuring compliance with the GDPR and other privacy regulations. Since this compliance typically comes at the cost of reduced performance or speed, there is a need for efficient mechanisms for secure storage that exploit the capabilities of both edge and cloud. The architecture consists of multi-cloud and multi-edge subsystems that will (i) deliver a more robust and secure platform, and (ii) use novel security and resource allocation techniques to manage data privacy for the stored and processed data. SERRANO considers a system model with multiple edge and remote clouds, aiming to tackle the challenges of managing: the heterogeneity of the QoS requirements from different applications, the limited resources of the edge clouds, and the policy restrictions from a multi-cloud system. In this way, a security-by-design solution for storage will be delivered.
Use Case 2 – High-performance Fintech Analysis
The management of investment personalized portfolios entails continuous monitoring and adjustment so that it has optimal return and risk balance. The markets and the portfolios are simulated for what if conditions. The result of these operations is trading orders that are subsequently executed. SERRANO’s ability to determine automatically the optimal execution platform enables the intelligent and transparent deployment of computationally and data intensive applications into a diverse set of cloud and HPC platforms. This capability will enable unprecedented innovation in investment management (higher return and lower risk), peer-to-peer lending (credit scoring and lower interests), insurance (premium calculation) and banking (fraud detection) with the application of compute intensive AI and ML algorithms. SERRANO will address three important limitations for high-performance fintech analysis. First, the enhanced security will simplify the implementation of secure channels between processes that run on different clouds, decreasing its dependence on a single cloud platform. Second, the HPC access through the cloud would enable innovation in using compute intensive operations for portfolio and market analysis. Third, the transparent deployment across different cloud platforms will enable the seamlessly integration of private infrastructures with various public infrastructures in a federated cloud setting.
Use Case 3 – Machine Anomaly Detection in Manufacturing Environments
Companies that manufacture extremely expensive, high added-value parts (e.g. for the aerospace sector) are very demanding in terms of machine availability and quality assurance. Predictive maintenance, remaining lifetime assessment and diagnosis of critical machine elements are state-of-the-part practices. However, some of the utilized techniques require from the machine to stop, before performing the analysis. As a result, the various hardware components are idle most of the time, waiting for the analysis procedures to start, something that the manufacturing industries are keen to avoid. Another approach is to perform these analyses continuously, while the hardware equipment keeps running at 100% and the state of the various independent components, along with the overall status is continuously reported. However, the high-frequency and high-accuracy sensors used for data acquisition, generate high volumes data, which are difficult to process in real-time at the edge due to limited availability of resources. Introducing mechanisms that orchestrate optimally data and computational movement in the edge, cloud and HPC can overcome this obstacle. This is the role of the SERRANO platform in this UC, highlighting it as a key enabler for the fourth industrial revolution.