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Editorial to the Special Section on the Cloud-Assisted Services 
Vlado Stankovski
1
, Roman Trobec
2
 
1
 University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Civil and Geodetic Engineering  
2
 J o že f Stefan Institute, Department of Communication Systems 
E-mail: vlado.stankovski@fgg.uni-lj.si 
 
 
Industries, businesses and academic organisations face a variety of difficult problems every day. In order to solve 
them, a whole range of distributed computing technologies and paradigms have evolved in the past decades. 
Cloud computing is among the more recent approaches. It aims to increase availability, improve redundancy and 
elasticity, and reduce application operational costs. The main enabling technology for Cloud computing is 
virtualization. Virtualization abstracts the physical infrastructure and facilitates its seamless use and management. 
Cloud computing provides all infrastructural resources as services, making use of well-established standards and 
best practices gained in the domain of the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to allow for global and easy 
access. In such a way, virtualization provides a greater availability, agility and reduces costs by increasing 
infrastructure utilization.  
 The foundation of Cloud computing is solid and it is widely promoted by the Information and Communication 
Technologies industry. Moreover, various new innovative Cloud computing approaches and applications are 
emerging on a daily basis. The 2nd International Conference on the Cloud-Assisted ServiceS (CLASS 2013) that 
took place from October 22-23, 2013 at Bled, Slovenia, was a lively event in which various new Cloud 
applications and approaches were presented and discussed.  
 Five of the Conference studies of the highest quality prepared in a journal-paper format and peer-reviewed are 
presented in this Special Section on the Cloud Assisted Services. The papers discuss the state-of-the-art in 
specific fields of Cloud computing and address a range of different topics.  
 The paper “A case study on multi-modal biometrics in the Cloud”, authored by Emeršič, Bule, Žganec-Gros, 
Štruc and Peer, presents two Cloud applications in the area of biometric recognition: a face-recognition service 
and a fingerprint-recognition service. The results of this work may be increasingly employed in various Web 
services that need authentication and validation of persons.  
 The paper “A model for SaaS-application integration, migration and backup with a common data model 
approach”, by Povše and Jurič, presents a data-integration model among various SaaS applications, such as 
preparation of security copies, migration of data when changing the SaaS provider, and interlinking the data.  
 The paper “Mobile Cloud for Telemetry Applications“, by the authors Suciu, Todoran, Apostu, Puican and 
Ularu,  presents a Cloud-computing application involving mobile phones and IPv6 in the area of telemetry. The 
paper tackles the networking quality of the service and the possibilities for its virtualization.  
 The paper “Multiple Cloud monitoring“, authored by Vičič and Brodnik, implements a monitoring architecture 
for applications running across multiple Clouds. 
 Finally, the paper “A Programming Framework for Porting Engineering Applications to the Cloud“, by the 
authors Južna and Stankovski, proposes a general purpose programming framework to be used by engineers to 
port their applications to the Cloud with minimal changes in their existing applications. The framework uses the 
mOSAIC PaaS solution.  
 
We would like to thank all the authors for their valuable contributions to the Special Section on the Cloud-
Assisted Services.