MIDDLEWARE NETWORKS- P5: The material in this book is presented in three major parts: IP Technology Fundamentals, IP Service Platform Fundamentals, and Building the IP Platform. Part I of IP Technology Fundamentals presents key technologies and issues that lay the foundation for building IP service platforms. | 176 Middleware Networks Concept Design and Deployment In addition to a cloud s description of its offerings all of the service peers connected to a cloud also provide descriptions to their particular services. Once a peer is connected to a cloud it can using standard mechanisms in the peer software access all of a cloud s service descriptions irrespective of their source be it the cloud itself or service peer. Not only was PICS designed to describe network content and services it was also designed to support filtering. Using cloud-aware peer software a peer can tailor restrict or block altogether the services it receives either from the cloud directly or via the cloud s service peers. For each peer the cloud maintains a set of peer-specific content and service restrictions that based on the PICS specifications of content and services provided by vendors and rating agents specify in precise detail the access rights and service privileges of the peer. This mechanism allows Parents to restrict a child s access to content or services that may be unsuitable or inappropriate such as violent network games or electronic brokerages A cloud provider to create and maintain differentiated service pools for classes of users a premier service pool may include quality of service guarantees and service offerings say digital paging that are not available to the members of a basic service pool Business subscribers to restrict their employees access to content and services that are not relevant to their line of business In addition the filtering specifications can be arranged hierarchically allowing an organization to mandate a generic set of filters for its members overall with various subgroups appending group-specific restrictions. For example a business that owns a cloud for its internal intranet can prevent the members of the engineering department from accessing the personnel database and at the same time grant the engineers exclusive access to high-performance computing .
