An Approach to Examine and Recognize Anomalies on Cloud Computing Platforms with Machine Learning Concepts

Abstract

Cloud computing is one of the most rapidly growing computing concepts in today's information technology world. It connects data and applications from various geographical locations. A large number of transactions and the hidden infrastructure in cloud computing systems have presented the research community with several challenges. Among these, maintaining cloud network security has emerged as a major challenge. It is critical to address issues in the quickly changing cloud computing market in order to guarantee that businesses can fully utilize cutting-edge technology, uphold strong security protocols, and maximize operational effectiveness. Businesses that successfully navigate these obstacles can maintain their competitiveness in a dynamic digital ecosystem by improving scalability, leveraging the flexibility provided by the cloud, and adapting to technological changes with ease. Anomaly detection (or outlier detection) is the identification of unusual or suspicious data that differs significantly from the majority of the data. Research on anomaly detection in cloud network data is crucial because it enables businesses to more rapidly and efficiently recognize potential security threats, network performance concerns, and other issues. Recently, machine learning methods have demonstrated their efficacy in anomaly detection. This research aimed to introduce a novel hybrid model for anomaly detection in cloud network data and to investigate the performance of this model in comparison to other machine learning algorithms. The research was conducted with the UNSW-NB15 anomaly dataset and employed various feature selection and pre-processing techniques to prepare the data for model training. The hybrid model was built using a combination of Random Forest and SVM algorithms and the process was evaluated using metrics such as F1-Score, Recall, Precision, and Accuracy. The result showed that the hybrid model has 94.23% accuracy and a total time of 109.92s which is the combination of the train time of 100.45s and prediction time of 9.47s. The limitations of the study include the class imbalance problem in the dataset and the lack of real-world applications for testing. The research suggests future work in the application of hybrid models in anomaly detection and cloud network security and the need for further investigation into the potential benefits of such models.