Hosame Abu-Amara

Transforming Enterprise Cloud Services

Transforming Enterprise Cloud Services addresses the fundamental ideology of Cloud Services and how enterprises in commercial, federal, and defense industries can transform their current information technology and management models to adopt this new method. It goes beyond the mere description of service frameworks in relation to cloud technologies and operations and provides practical path-forward solutions for identified challenges. For instance, as organizations transform their data and service models to compete in a new environment where data and services coexist with others in a public-held eco-system, enterprises have to face the challenge of data synthesis from a massive number of sources. One answer to this issue relies on a cross-organizational policy and technology coordination that can ensure that data will not be reproduced or manipulated by unauthorized entities. Transforming Enterprise Cloud Services explains how organizations can justify their current practices to take advantage of such collaboration synthesis securely, safely, reliably, and cost-effectively. Transforming Enterprise Cloud Services elucidates the service-oriented nature of Cloud Services and identifies issues and challenges from clients and vendors perspectives. It also portrays how enterprise operators can successfully deploy their IT environment from both business and technical perspectives to enable massive scalability, high resilience, enforced security, and collaborative dynamics.

Challenges of Enterprise Cloud Services1

In traditional IT organizations, the operator has complete control of and visibility into their service offering and infrastructure. All components are accessible and can be measured by the enterprise’s set of well known tools. Whether complex or simple, all components are used to analyze the measured metrics and tune their systems to their optimal performance. However, an enterprise no longer has control of or visibility into the components of the service when using Cloud services. Without this visibility, the service-level warrantee is no longer straightforward. Additionally, attempts at isolating problems between an enterprise and its vendor has become more commonplace and deal with more complex issues. Thus, the relationship between Cloud vendors and enterprises must evolve.

Cloud Service Architecture and Related Standards3,2

Many enterprises plan to migrate their IT infrastructures to Cloud-based infrastructures through a phased approach. With the existing enterprise systems having arcane and inconsistent interfaces, the implementations have a tendency to develop into more complicated process flows, consisting of many subsystem interfaces to accommodate existing processes. In some cases, enterprise IT systems need to duplicate some functions to maintain consistency of business information so that enterprises can make sound financial decisions. These issues, however, are not the intent of this book. Instead, our approach is to look at the Cloud service architecture as a clean sheet scenario, peeling off issues and challenges layer by layer to reveal relevant, ultimate solutions.

Introduction to Enterprise Services and Cloud Resources1

Cloud Computing is the latest revolution in the Information Technology (IT ) industry, following the personal computer revolution and the Internet revolution. This new technology not only matters to the IT industry, but also to technology consumers because its services will soon be directly accessible to consumers’ daily appliance-level devices.

Building and Configuring Enterprise Cloud Services3,2

Advanced enterprises must stay competitive by continuing to invest in compelling and attractive new products for the market. These new business cases must be justifiable and set apart from their traditional cost system to adopt the utility pricing model common in Cloud services. Although cost and pricing are two significant financial challenges that SPs must deal with in terms of customers’ experience and expectations, they are not alone. The pressing issues on the technology front also cause unavoidable impacts to SPs, they include the effect of SOA strategies, impact of disaster recovery plans, data management policies, and risk profiles for mitigation strategies that are common to typical enterprise processes. Depending upon the market size of the enterprises, the complexity level of their management systems varies. However, regardless of the amount of money enterprises invest in these management systems, they must be able to answer challenges from service levels, privacy matters, compliances, data ownership, and data mobility in order to fully participate in a Cloud ecosystem. Enterprise s that are heavily technology-dependent must also be sensitive to the timing for introducing new methodologies or technologies to their target markets. This can avoid unproductive results caused by either a premature or late deployment of a new or updated service.

Cloud Service Business Scenarios and Market Analysis 1

The introduction of Cloud services is altering the way enterprises build their infrastructure and applications. Lower deployment costs, easier market entry, faster payback on new services, and expected higher ROI will make the Cloud-based environment a top choice for big and small service developers. With this new tool, small companies, even individuals, can leverage a large amount of resources and capabilities with a relatively small investment. This change presents a completely new business model and unprecedented opportunities for small and big corporations to compete in the current IT frontline. It is inevitable that global growth trends in service development will increase the importance of high-leverage application frameworks, enabling more rapid changes to higher-quality services.

Enterprise Cloud Service Applications and Transformations 1,2

The introduction of Cloud services forever changes the way end users use paid/free services. New expectations are on the rise, with customers demanding more control of their data. The tactical decision on the part of the service user to trust third parties with data access, management, and security is no longer acceptable, and users are quickly realizing the price of freedom in terms of the loss of rights and identity protection.

Service Monitoring and Quality Assurance2

Enterprise administrators and users can trust Cloud Computing services only if the quality of the Cloud services is superior to what administrators and users expect from their existing private enterprise networks. For this reason, service monitoring and quality management are two key functional areas that can provide the metrics that assure the success of transforming enterprise networks.

Security for Enterprise Cloud Services2

Companies and individuals have natural concerns about the security of their data. The term “security” is rather ambiguous, in that it can mean “confidentiality,” “authenticity” “timeliness,” “availability” or many other definitions. We use the term “security” to mean ensuring that the data can be accessed only by authorized entities and that the data is confidential, authentic, up-to-date, and exists.

Networked Service Management 2

Cloud Computing can best be modeled as a service offering. Enterprises use the Cloud services to augment, replace, or enhance the enterprise service offerings. This is contributed by Clouds’ mechanisms for service definitions and for service deliveries. For instance, SOA defines a powerful paradigm for service definitions, while Service Delivery Platforms define powerful paradigms for service delivery mechanisms.