Replica Placement Strategy (RPS) for Effective Network Usage in Cloud Environment

The cloud environment is substantial for streamlined operations and improved efficiency in the current digital landscape. Nevertheless, any systems on cloud platforms ought to face vulnerability and are bound to have a risk of failures and data loss. To ensure business continuity is preserved in any circumstances, data replication emerges as one of the solutions to hinder disruptions in cloud environments. This study explores the significant role of data replications with a multi-objective strategy and summarizes contributions developed by researchers to ensure replica placement guarantees the enhancement of numerous performance metrics. The prominent challenge is developing a comprehensive data replication strategy with a minimal replication process yet guarantees efficient network usage. Inefficient network usage remains a crucial problem derived from inappropriate data center selection criteria in cloud replica placement strategies. Therefore, to alleviate the issue, this research proposed a Replica Placement Strategy (RPS) for Effective Network Usage in a Cloud Environment, which identified decisive factors when selecting a data center to place replica copies. The key factors are file merit, space merit, and connection merit. The CloudSim simulation tool was used to conduct a comprehensive experiment, and the results proved that the proposed RPS significantly enhanced effective network usage by 76 and 109% betterments on average, outperformed the other two similar research work strategies, respectively. The key contributions will be visible to researchers exploring more explicit strategies in advancing cloud replication for future research demands.