Robert John Walters

The development that leads to the Cloud Computing Business Framework

Abstract The Cloud Computing Business Framework (CCBF) is proposed to help organisations achieve good Cloud design, deployment, migration and services. There are four key areas to be addressed: (i) Classification; (ii) Organisational Sustainability Modelling (OSM); (iii) Service Portability and (iv) Linkage. Each areas focus is described, and we explain how each fits into the CCBF and work altogether. The process that leads the CCBF is supported by literature, case studies, where examples in each CCBF key area are used to illustrate its effectiveness and contributions to organisations adopting it. CCBF has been used in several organisations offering added values and positive impacts.

Case Studies and Organisational Sustainability Modelling Presented by Cloud Computing Business Framework

In this paper, Cloud Computing Business Framework CCBF is proposed to help organisations achieve good Cloud design, deployment, migration, and services. Although organisations adopt Cloud Computing for Web Services, technical and business challenges emerge, including the measurement of Cloud business performance. Organisational Sustainability Modelling OSM is a way to measure Cloud business performance quantitatively and accurately. It combines statistical computation and 3D Visualisation to present the Return on Investment arising from the adoption of Cloud Computing by organisations. 3D visualisation simplifies the review process and is a method for Return of Investment ROI valuation. Two detailed case studies with SAP and Vodafone are presented, where OSM has analysed the business performance and explained how CCBF offers insights, which are helpful for WS and Grid businesses. Comparisons and discussions between CCBF and other approaches related to WS are presented, where lessons learned are useful for Web Services, Cloud and Grid communities.

Organisational sustainability modelling-An emerging service and analytics model for evaluating Cloud Computing adoption with two case studies

We develop a model, Organisational sustainability modelling (OSM), to evaluate Cloud Computing to analyse the status of risk and return.OSM is an Emerging Services and Analytics for Cloud Computing. We explain the supporting theory, how to use OSM and how to process lots of data.We compare OSM with Capital Asset Pricing Model for data processing and analysis.We present two OSM case studies and explain inputs, data collection, data analysis and results.We explain how OSM can be useful and efficient for organisations using Cloud Computing and justify our research contributions. Cloud Computing is an emerging technology which promises to bring with it great benefits to all types of computing activities including business support. However, the full commitment to Cloud Computing necessary to gain the full benefit is a major project for any organisation, since it necessitates adoption of new business processes and attitudes to computing services in addition to the immediately obvious systems changes. Hence the evaluation of a Cloud Computing project needs to consider the balance of benefits and risks to the organisation in the full context of the environment in which it operates; it is not sufficient or appropriate to examine technical considerations alone.In this paper, we consider the application of CAPM, a well established approach used for the analysis of risks and benefits of commercial projects to Cloud adoption projects and propose a revised and improved technique, OSM. To support the validity of OSM, two full case studies are presented. In the first, we describe an application of the approach to the iSolutions Group at University of Southampton, which focuses on evaluations of Cloud Computing service improvement. We then illustrate the use of OSM for measuring learning satisfaction of two cohort groups at the University of Greenwich. The results confirm the advantages of using OSM. We conclude that OSM can analyse the risk and return status of Cloud Computing services and help organisations that adopt Cloud Computing to evaluate and review their Cloud Computing projects and services. OSM is an emerging service and analytics model supported by several case studies.

Business Integration as a Service

This paper presents Business Integration as a Service BIaS which enables connections between services operating in the Cloud. BIaS integrates different services and business activities to achieve a streamline process. The authors illustrate this integration using two services; Return on Investment ROI Measurement as a Service RMaaS and Risk Analysis as a Service RAaaS in two case studies at the University of Southampton and Vodafone/Apple. The University of Southampton case study demonstrates the cost-savings and the risk analysis achieved, so two services can work as a single service. The Vodafone/Apple case study illustrates statistical analysis and 3D Visualisation of expected revenue and associated risk. These two cases confirm the benefits of BIaS adoption, including cost reduction and improvements in efficiency and risk analysis. Implementation of BIaS in other organisations is also discussed. Important data arising from the integration of RMaaS and RAaaS are useful for management of University of Southampton and potential and current investors for Vodafone/Apple.

RolEnact - Role Based Enactable Models of Business Processes

This paper describes RolEnact: a process-modelling notation used to provide enactable models of process instances. The paper shows how RolEnact models may be produced which are equivalent to role activity diagrams (RADs). This allows the modeller to describe processes in a notation (RADs); which can be understood both by process consultants and process users, whilst retaining the ability to generate enactable process scenarios.

TOWARDS A STRUCTURED CLOUD ROI: THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON COST-SAVING AND USER SATISFACTION CASE STUDIES

Organisational Sustainability Modelling (OSM) is a new way to measure Cloud business performance quantitatively and accurately, and is a key area offered by Cloud Computing Business Framework (CCBF). OSM combines statistical computation and 3D Visualisation to present the Return on Investment (ROI) arising from the adoption of Cloud Computing by organisations, and makes use of a highly structured and organised process to review and evaluate Cloud business performance. The School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), University of Southampton, focusing on cost-savings, is the case study used to illustrate. In addition, i-Solutions and Corporate Planning of the University of Southampton, focusing on user confidence level and service improvement, are another two case studies to support. Data measurements have been taken in the past three years and quantitative analysis has been carefully checked and calculated by OSM to measure ROI. The University of Southampton has achieved cost-saving and user confidence with service improvement offered by Cloud adoption and services, which have been deployed by several universities in the adoption of CCBF. We hope in the near future, more case studies with Green IT, OSM and Cloud migration offered by CCBF can be presented.

Factors Influencing an Organisation's Intention to Adopt Cloud Computing in Saudi Arabia

Cloud computing is paradigm that has emerged to deliver IT services to consumers as a utility service over the Internet. In developing countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, cloud computing is still not widely adopted. As a result, this study seeks to investigate the most influential factors that can encourage an organisation to use the cloud or which might impede them from moving to it. This research proposes an integrated model that incorporates aspects of the Technology-Organisation-Environment (TOE) framework and integrates the critical factors from existing theories along with other factors to examine the impact of this variable on the adoption decision of enterprises. Future work will be focused on confirming the proposed model.

Behavioural Analysis of Component-Based Systems

Abstract Software Engineers continue to search for efficient ways to build high quality systems. Two contrasting techniques that promise to help with the effective construction of high quality systems are the use of formal models during design and the use of components during development. In this paper, we take the position that these techniques work well together. Hardware Engineers have shown that building systems from components has brought enormous benefits. Using components permits hardware engineers to consider systems at an abstract level, making it possible for them to build and reason about systems that would otherwise be too large and complex to understand. It also enables them to make effective reuse of existing designs. It seems reasonable to expect that using components in software development will also bring advantages. Formal methods provide a means to reason about a program (or system) enabling the creation of programs which can be proved to meet their specifications. However, the size of real systems makes these methods impractical for any but the simplest of structures — constructing a complete formal specification for a commercial system is a daunting task. Using formal methods for the whole of a large commercial system is not practical, but some of the advantages of using them can be obtained where a system is to be built from communicating components, by building and evaluating a formal model of the system. We describe how a model of a system to be implemented using COM might be constructed using a particular modelling tool, RolEnact. We discuss the extent to which validation of the model contributes to the validity of the eventual solution.

Cloud Storage and Bioinformatics in a Private Cloud Deployment: Lessons for Data Intensive Research

This paper describes service portability for a private cloud deployment, including a detailed case study about Cloud Storage and bioinformatics services developed as part of the Cloud Computing Adoption Framework (CCAF). Our Cloud Storage design and deployment is based on Storage Area Network (SAN) technologies, details of which include functionalities, technical implementation, architecture and user support. Experiments for data services (backup automation, data recovery and data migration) are performed and results confirm backup automation is completed swiftly and is reliable for data-intensive research. The data recovery result confirms that execution time is in proportion to quantity of recovered data, but the failure rate increases in an exponential manner. The data migration result confirms execution time is in proportion to disk volume of migrated data, but again the failure rate increases in an exponential manner. In addition, benefits of CCAF are illustrated using several bioinformatics examples such as tumour modelling, brain imaging, insulin molecules and simulations for medical training. Our Cloud Storage solution described here offers cost reduction, time-saving and user friendliness.

Critical success factors (CSFs) for information technology governance (ITG)

The main studys aim is to investigate and identify the factors that encourage the successful implementation of ITG which will be called in this paper Critical Success Factors (CSFs).The literature has been thoroughly reviewed and analysed to identify these CSFs.The literature includes IT Governance standards and best practices; ITG frameworks and models; and related studies.The extracted, analysed and modified factors have been summarised, classified and sorted based on their importance, relativity and the proper sequence.Finding of these factors went through different steps in order to have the solution framework, Success Factors for IT Governance (SFITG). With the rapid evolution of Information Technology (IT) applications and practices across the organization, appropriate IT Governance (ITG) has become essential to an organizations success. As IT is associated with risk and value opportunities, a comprehensive, high-level system is required in each organization to minimise the associated risks and optimize value. This requirement triggered the emergence of ITG. Many researchers have addressed this field; however, the role played by critical success factors (CSFs) in the successful implementation of ITG has not yet received adequate attention. This gap in the research motivated the present study, with the main aim of defining the CSFs needed for the successful implementation of ITG. CSFs were studied and extracted from the literature review and then analysed, categorised, and synthesized to create the Success Factors for IT Governance Framework.