3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
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Item The adoption of cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS): a descriptive and empirical study of South African SMEs(2019-10-31) Maserumule, Mabuke DorcusThe purpose of this study was to describe the state of cloud-based software (SaaS) adoption among South African SMEs and to investigate the factors affecting their adoption of SaaS solutions. The technological, organisational and environmental (TOE) factors influencing cloud-based software adoption within SMEs were identified through a review of existing TOE literature. In addition, institutional theory and diffusion of innovation theory were also used to underpin the study. A research model hypothesising the outcome of the identified TOE factors on the adoption of cloud-based software was developed and tested. Specifically, factors hypothesised to influence SaaS adoption were compatibility, security concern, top management support and coercive pressures. This study employed a relational, quantitative research approach. A structured questionnaire was developed and administered as an online survey. Data was collected from a sample of 134 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that provided usable responses. The collected data was used to firstly describe the state of adoption. Secondly, the extent to which various TOE factors impact on adoption was examined through the use of multiple regression. It was found that compatibility, security concern, top management support and coercive pressures influence adoption while trust, cost, relative advantage, complexity, geographic dispersion, normative and mimetic pressures did not have significant effects. This study adds value to the Information Systems literature as it uses the TOE framework alongside institutional theory and diffusion of innovation theory to explain the adoption of cloud-based software solutions by South African SMEs. This study provides information on the current state of adoption for cloud-based software within SMEs in South Africa. Organisations can also learn about the factors contributing to this adoption. Organisations can also be informed that for adoption to be successful, technological, organisational and environmental factors must be taken into consideration. Results assist organisations wanting to implement cloud-based software solutions. Specifically, results provide a benchmark for SMEs on where their organisations stand compared to other organisations with regards to SaaS adoption (for example whether they are lagging behind, they are on par, or whether they are innovators). This could inform their IT procurement decisions, e.g. to consider whether cloud-based software solutions are strategic and necessary to keep abreast with peers and competitors.Item A software architecture for a real-time big data system: a case study of a spectrum-sensing enabled whitespace database(2018) Montsi, Litsietsi GeorgeDue to the ever-growing need to process vast amounts of data in real-time, more and more tools which serve different needs in the real-time Big Data processing pipeline have sprung out. However, holistic industry accepted frameworks that address all real-time Big Data processing requirements across the entire pipeline have not yet been developed. More so, the area of dynamic spectrum access, has more and more devices connecting to previously unavailable radio frequency spectrum. This vastly growing number of devices need real-time orchestration on how they access this newly made available spectrum. The development of a real-time Big Data system in the realm of dynamic spectrum access as required by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research served as a case study for this research. This research provides a step in reaching an industry wide accepted software reference architecture which will be followed in the development of real-time Big Data systems. This is done through uncovering the most important quality/architectural requirements of realtime Big Data systems which such a reference architecture is to address. It is shown that all major software reference architectures (Java Enterprise Edition, AutoSar, Microsoft.Net, and others) were developed with emphasis placed on addressing a set of specific prioritised requirements. Hence this research uses this principle to propose a method to help in the development of software architectures and software reference architectures of real-time Big Data systems. In this research, a case study is used to make inference on the general population of real time Big Data systems about the method proposed in this research. A mathematical ranking method is employed to prioritise software architecture requirements of a case study system and the results are compared with literature to increase the accuracy of the inference. Then architecture design and experiments were carried-out and presented to the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research as the client for acceptance, which would serve as validation. This was further validated by comparing the results of the case study to work done by other researchers. Having uncovered the most important quality attributes for realtime Big Data systems, the software architecture design process for such systems is simplified and fertile ground has been laid for the development of software reference architectures for real-time Big Data systems.Item An SDN-based firewall shunt for data-intensive science applications(2016) Miteff, SimeonData-intensive research computing requires the capability to transfer les over long distances at high throughput. Stateful rewalls introduce su cient packet loss to prevent researchers from fully exploiting high bandwidth-delay network links [25]. To work around this challenge, the science DMZ design [19] trades o stateful packet ltering capability for loss-free forwarding via an ordinary Ethernet switch. We propose a novel extension to the science DMZ design, which uses an SDN-based rewall. This report introduces NFShunt, a rewall based on Linux's Net lter combined with OpenFlow switching. Implemented as an OpenFlow 1.0 controller coupled to Net lter's connection tracking, NFShunt allows the bypass-switching policy to be expressed as part of an iptables rewall rule-set. Our implementation is described in detail, and latency of the control-plane mechanism is reported. TCP throughput and packet loss is shown at various round-trip latencies, with comparisons to pure switching, as well as to a high-end Cisco rewall. Cost, as well as operations and maintenance aspects, are compared and analysed. The results support reported observations regarding rewall introduced packet-loss, and indicate that the SDN design of NFShunt is a technically viable and cost-e ective approach to enhancing a traditional rewall to meet the performance needs of data-intensive researchersItem Tone labelling algorithm for Sesotho(2012-02-06) Raborife, MphoStudies have shown that text-to-speech systems need detailed prosodic models of a language in order to ideally sound natural to native speakers of the language. A text-to-speech system developed for Sesotho needs to have tone implemented in it since Sesotho is a tonal language which uses pitch variations to distinguish lexical and/or grammatical meaning. In order to implement tone for a language such as Sesotho, it is necessary for a tone modeling algorithm to receive as input the tone labels of the syllables of a word. This allows the algorithm to predict the appropriate intonation of the word. The aim of our study is to improve a basic tone labeling algorithm that predicts tone labels using three Sesotho tonal rules. The application of this algorithm is restricted to polysyllabic verb stems. The research study involves implementing an extended tone labeling algorithm that implements four additional Sesotho tonal rules and extends its application to all the other parts of speech. The results of our study show that the extended tone labeling algorithm significantly improves the basic algorithm by increasing the number of matched tone labels. Furthermore, our study provides the basic step to tone modeling for languages such as Sesotho which do not mark tone labels in orthography.