Fog Computing: Will it be the Future of Cloud Computing? Mohamed Firdhous 1 , Osman Ghazali 2 and Suhaidi Hassan 3 1 University of Moratuwa, Moratuwa, Sri Lanka 1 Mohamed.Firdhous@uom.lk 2,3 Universiti Utara Malaysia, Sintok, Kedah, Malaysia 2 osman@uum.edu.my, 3 suhaidi@uum.edu.my ABSTRACT Cloud computing is the newest computing paradigm that makes computing resources available over the Internet on a utility costing basis. Cloud computing offers many advantages to users in terms of reduced cost, elimination of system administrative functions, increased flexibility, better reliability and location independence. Though these are definite advantages, cloud computing also suffers from certain limitations. These limitations arise from the very same reason that is considered an advantage too. Hosting of cloud data centres in the Internet creates large and unpredictable network latencies and undefined security issues as sensitive data is now entrusted to a third party. Also location independence of processing in cloud computing may also not desirable for certain types of networks such as sensor networks and Internet of Things. These services are known as location aware services and require location dependent fast processing. In order to overcome these limitations, researchers have proposed a new cloud computing model called fog computing where the cloud system is located either at the edge of the private network or very close to it. In this paper, the authors take an in depth look at both these technologies to investigate fog computing can reliably overcome the limitations of cloud computing and effectively replace it and become the de facto cloud computing model of the future. KEYWORDS cloud computing, fog computing. 1 INTRODUCTION Cloud computing has gained the attention of both users and service providers as the most promising computing paradigm, no other computing paradigms that came before enjoyed [1]. Cloud computing makes computing resources such as hardware, application development platform and computer applications available as services over the Internet. The services made available this manner are commonly known as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) [2]. Figure 1 shows the cloud computing business layers as how they are stacked on each other. The bottom two layers namely the physical hardware layer and the virtualized hardware layer provide the required platform along the with necessary security and isolation for multiple systems to run simultaneously. Figure 1 Layers of Cloud Computing Cloud computing provides many advantages to users compared to traditional purchase, own and run your own computing systems model. The main advantages of cloud computing over the traditional computing paradigm are the economic advantages and the elimination of computer systems administrative tasks and associated costs. Users can access the cloud services and pay for only the services accessed on a utility costing basis [3]. Utilities such as electricity, water, gas and telephony are used by Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Informatics & Applications, Kuala Terengganu, Malaysia, 2014 ISBN: 978-1-941968-00-0 ©2014 SDIWC 8