Ofer Biran received his B.Sc. and D.Sc. degrees from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, in the Faculty of Computer Science, where his research focused on distributed algorithms. He subsequently joined the IBM Haifa Research Lab in 1991, where he currently manages the Cloud and Data Technologies group, which focuses on advanced and autonomic management aspects of cloud and data computing. Before that, Ofer worked in the areas of network design, remote objects technology, security and autonomic systems management. He has led various research and development projects in these areas and authored the security component of the iSCSI protocol specification.