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Introduction

“Cloud” computing – a relatively recent term, builds on decades of research in virtualization,


distributed computing, utility computing, and more recently networking, web and software
services. Dillion(2010, p 27) argues Cloud computing as a model enabling convenient, on-
demand network access to shared pool of configurable computing resources. Atkins et al.(2009,
p3) presents A key differentiating element of a successful information technology (IT) is its
ability to become a true, valuable, and economical contributor to cyber infrastructure . “Cloud”
computing embraces cyber infrastructure, and builds upon decades of research in virtualization,
distributed computing, “grid computing”, utility computing, and, more recently, networking, web
and software services. It implies a service oriented architecture, reduced information technology
overhead for the end-user, greater flexibility, reduced total cost of ownership, on-demand
services and many other things.

Fang (2010, p331) defines Cloud computing as a methodology for delivering IT resources in a
more cost effective manner both to the user and by the vendor or supplier. Also cloud computing
is referred to on-demand computing. This refers to consumption of resources and scaling them
up or down on demand. The equilibrium is supposed to reduce scarcity of resources in terms
computing needs at the enterprise level.

In the cloud data is stored in a remote data centre and cloud refers to the combination of all
software, infrastructure, platforms, network within the defined scope of the cloud. Thus, Kim
(2010, p30) mentioned cloud has two aspects. First, to dynamically allocate resources on the
request and second, payment for resources for its actual usage. These have been existing for a
while in our day to day life. Some of the common examples are free email services as
telecommunication services such as fixed land lines, mobile service providers or internet services
as yahoo, hotmail, Gmail. An extension for this is the Google Apps which provide us with more
services and we can subscribe resources on demand and pay for them on a subscription basis.

In general the cloud is expected to provide three main categories of services(Dilion, 2010;
Monfront, 2010). Software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a
service (IaaS). When considering the architecture of cloud computing, we generally come across
three main architectures. Namely, public, private and hybrid architectures. These types are

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generally defined reflecting its delivery model and scope of the cloud defined by its stakeholders.
The adoption of the cloud environment for an organization is a chasm as at now and through
observing critical success factors in implementing ERP solutions in the past(Wong, 2009). As to
passed research in cloud computing the common adoption issues or concerns in cloud computing
are outage, security, performance, compliance, integration, cost, environment and service level
agreements (SLAs’). The implementation strategies generally depend on the delivery model and
the services required. This is the variable factor which is due to change subjected to the
architecture and adoption issues for the category of organization.

As to market predictions, a large amount of cloud adoption is on its way in the next few years
and it will change the way most of the IT practices have been in past. Vouk (2008, p 1) presents
“Cloud computing” is the next natural step in the evolution of on-demand information
technology services and products. To a large extent, cloud computing will be based on
virtualized resources. This paper will discuss a framework for cloud computing architecture,
adoption issues and implementation strategy for SaaS in an enterprise.

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2. Cloud computing Model, Characteristics and Benefits

2.1 Cloud Computing Model


Fang (2010, p330) defines that accords with the behaviour of Cloud Computing is: Cloud Computing is a
parallel distributed system, and it consists of a series of interconnected and highly virtualized computers.
Cloud Computing is a uniform computing model based on service agreement between the service
providers and service recipients. The system can spontaneously carry out dynamic adjustment of
computer resources.
Obviously, Cloud Computing is the effective integration of distributed cluster and grid computing. It will
serve as the next generation data centre, available to users of virtualization and real-time dynamic
allocation of computing resources. Yoon et al (2009, p633) discuss nowadays, users need to manage the
installation, deployment, update of various software systems. Users need to maintain computing resources
and software and hardware. Therefore, the outsourcing of the computing environment and platform can
effectively help users deal with large complex IT infrastructure.
Cloud Computing can provide precisely the best answer to solve these problems. It consists of a series of
service model, which mainly consists of three basic service levels.

2.2 Cloud Computing Characteristics


Fang et al (2010), Yoon et al (2009) and Atkins (2010) in common discuss the cloud computing
characteristics with regard to user centred interface design, on demand service, QoS and self management
system which is articulated in this section. Fang et al (2010), mentioned different from grid and cluster
computing, Cloud Computing is a system that adopts Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and is based
on service layers. Its main characteristics are as follows:

• User-Centred Interface Design


As for the interface of cloud computing, there is no need for the users to change their usual
working habits. For example, development language, compiler and operating system installed at
the user end are light weight ones.
Besides, most of the Cloud Computing products can be directly used through browser.

• On-Demand Service
Cloud Computing can provide demand-based services and resources for users, and the users can
select the necessary computing resources as per their demands. For example: software

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installation, network configuration, and hardware configuration. The users enjoy the highest
access to these resources.

• Quality Guarantee of Service


The system environment of Cloud Computing can assure a high service quality for users, such as
CPU bandwidth, and memory capacity.

• Self-Management System
As a self-management system, the hardware, software and data for Cloud Computing can be
configured and adjusted automatically, acting as a platform mirror image for users.

2.3 Cloud Computing Benefits

Botts et al(2010); Kim et al (2009) discuss in general the benefits of cloud computing. Cloud
computing fundamentally changes the way that IT services delivered to organizations. Instead of
both owning and managing IT services for themselves, or using an outsourcing approach built
around dedicated hardware, software, and support services, organizations can use cloud
computing to meet their IT requirements using a flexible, on-demand, and rapidly scalable model
that requires neither ownership on their part, nor provision of dedicated resources.

Some of the benefits that cloud computing brings are as follows to Dillion. (2010):

• Reduced Cost: Cost is a clear benefit of cloud computing, both in terms of CapEx and
OpEx. The reduction in CapEx is obvious because an organization can spend in
increments of required capacity and does not need to build infrastructure for maximum
(or burst) capacity. For most enterprises, OpEx constitutes the majority of spending;

therefore, by utilizing a cloud provider or adopting cloud paradigms internally,


organizations can save operational and maintenance budgets.

• Flexibility: Flexibility benefits derive from rapid provisioning of new capacity and rapid
relocation or migration of workloads. In public sector settings, cloud computing provides
agility in terms of procurement and acquisition process and timelines.

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• Improved Automation: Cloud computing is based on the premise that services can not
only be provisioned, but also de-provisioned in a highly automated fashion. This specific
attribute offers significant efficiencies to enterprises.

• Focus on Core Competency: Government agencies can reap the benefits of cloud
computing in order to focus on its core mission and core objectives and leverage IT
resources as a means to provide services to citizens.

• Sustainability: The poor energy efficiency of most existing data centers, due to poor
design or poor asset utilization, is now understood to be environmentally and
economically unsustainable. Through leveraging economies of scale and the capacity to
manage assets more efficiently, cloud computing consumes far less energy and other
resources than a traditional IT data center.

2.4 Technology Used in Cloud Computing

Botts et al(2010), Kim et al (2009), Dillion (2010) and Liu (2009) in common discuss the
technologies used in cloud computing. They commonly focus in Virtualization, Service flow
and workflow, web service and SOA, web 2.0, large scale distributed systems and
programming model. In this document I take the common points and articulate them as
following;

• Virtualization

Virtualization technology reuses hardware equipment to provide an expandable system


environment with extra flexibility. Such virtualization technologies as VMware (2009)
and Xen can act as a demand-based virtualization IT equipment. In order to use the
resources in Cloud, the users can configure their personal network and system
environment through such virtualization network as VPN.

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• Service Flow and Workflow

Based on a series of service layers, Cloud Computing provides a complete set of service
environment as per demand. According to SOA, the service layer below will support the
service layer above, and the service flow and work flow will be ultimately integrated.

• Web Services and SOA

Through standard WSDL, SOAP and UDDI, cloud services can be delivered by the way
of Web service. The service structure in the cloud can be managed by SOA.

As a result, the services can be used in different distributed platforms through network.

• Web2.0

Through Internet and novel Web design & application, Web2.0 can strengthen
information share and the interactive cooperation of users. Accordingly, many brand new
designs and applications are produced on the basis of Web architecture. Taking
advantage of the Web2.0 technology actually, Cloud Computing can provide the users
with various services by the application of Web.

• Large-Scale Distributed Systems

Cloud Computing requires large-scale distributed memory system and computing ability
to realize the rental of computing resources and memory spaces by users. The data in
cloud should be transparently transferred, integrated and managed. Ghemawat and
Gobioff (2004, p 28) mentioned Google File System and Amazon S3 as the related
examples.

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• Programming Model

Users can write the application program used under cloud environment through cloud
computing. Efficiently utilizing the highly concurrent cloud architecture, the
programming model in the cloud environment can solve new problems. Dean &
Ghemwat(2004, p1) describes MapReduce as a new programming model, which is
suitable for mass data treatment. The model divides the data set into many small
keys/values through Map operation and after that deals with the key/value aggregate with
the same key. Hadoop (Fang et al, 2010) is a frame with open source to get the
programming model and provides a Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS).

3. Cloud Architecture

Dillon (2010, p.28); IBM (2010) defines cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient
on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be
rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provide
interaction.

3.1 Private Cloud

As to IBM white paper (2010, p.4) private cloud is an organization of resources within a
limited scope and boundary, and is an on-premise resource organization. Dillion (2010,p 4)
argue a private cloud as the infrastructure is operated solely within a single organization, and
managed by the organization or a third party regardless whether it is located on or off
premise. The motivation to setup a private cloud within an organization has several aspects.
First, to maximize and optimize the utilization of existing in-house resources. Second,

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security concerns including data privacy and trust also make private cloud an option for
many firms. Third, data transfer cost from local IT infrastructure to a public cloud is still
rather considerable. Fourth, organizations always require full control over mission-critical
activities that reside behind their firewalls.

Private cloud within an organization can be subdivided in to 3 types. Namely exploratory


cloud, departmental cloud and enterprise cloud.

• Exploratory cloud—An IBM white paper (2010) defines this delivery model represents
an organization’s initial foray into cloud computing, in which the primary objective is to
develop cloud delivery skills and experience. The goals in implementing an exploratory
cloud, similar to a proof of concept are to develop consumer and provider competencies
and create awareness of unique cloud architectural and management system
requirements. Its value is derived in developing cloud service capabilities and an
understanding of the technical nuances required in a cloud environment, as well as a
starting point for establishing return on investment via cloud service delivery. An
exploratory cloud requires that an organization have documented standards, be well
managed and disciplined, have standards based tools that can be developed or already
exist, and have existing tools that are extensible. This type of cloud would likely be
chosen to process compute-intensive, non-mission-critical workloads.

• Departmental cloud—IBM white paper(2010) argues both the IT organization


supplying cloud services and the functional department consuming cloud services are
within the same organization, with the department driving the requirements. In a
departmental cloud, the goal is to expand use of cloud computing to consumers those not
familiar with cloud capabilities and to begin developing business support systems and
operational support systems capabilities. Its value is derived from enhanced shared
resource competencies and virtualization management skills as well as a deeper
understanding of the benefits of alternative delivery models, captured within the business
support system. To implement a departmental cloud, the organization must have evolving
open standards as well as capabilities for data virtualization and basic cloud security.

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Workloads processed within this cloud might include test environments or department-
specific applications.

• Enterprise cloud—IBM white paper (2010) defines the IT organization supplying the
cloud and the organization or organizations consuming cloud services are within the same
enterprise, but exist within different management boundaries. The goal in an enterprise
cloud is to dynamically solve time-critical business problems with existing, previously
idle resources. This model delivers value by optimizing the organization’s investment in
IT resource capacity. An enterprise cloud requires that security be both well defined and
well implemented, and that the organization have additional service management
capabilities, such as monitoring, automated provisioning and user authentication.
Metering and billing, which enables IT to charge lines of business for cloud services
consumed, is another key capability. E-mail and internal collaboration tools are some of
the workloads that might be processed through this cloud. For each of the three subtypes
in a private cloud, both the business and operational support systems are within the same
enterprise management boundary as the cloud services.

3.2 Public Cloud

Dillion (2010, p 28) mentions a public cloud to be the dominant form of current cloud
computing deployment model. The public cloud is used by the general public cloud
consumers and the cloud service provider has the full ownership of the public cloud with its
own policy, value and profit, costing and changing model. Many popular cloud services are
public clouds including Amazon EC2, S3, Google AppEngine and Force.com.

As to our model the public cloud can be subdivided in to two categories. Namely, Exclusive
cloud and open cloud.

• Exclusive Cloud

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IBM white paper (2010, p3) defines an exclusive cloud is most typically used to provide
shared services to the members of a single group or organization, such as a consortium
of universities or research institutions, a company and its trusted business partners or
remote locations, or an industry or trade association. In an exclusive cloud, the goal is to
provide access to trusted participants so they can use mission-critical applications. The
known members consume services via their relationship with the umbrella organization,
while the umbrella organization has the business relationship with the cloud provider.
There are two critical distinguishing characteristics of the exclusive public cloud. First,
the cloud provider and the organization consuming cloud services are known to each
other and are able to negotiate service-level parameters. This business relationship can
extend beyond that of consumer and supplier—for example, the consumer could have a
larger out-sourcing agreement with the provider—but it is not required. Second, any
delivery resources used to provide services to the organization are dedicated to this
exclusive cloud and are not shared with any other provider delivery environments or any
cloud consumers outside of the organization. It is important to note that a “virtual private
cloud” is not the same as an exclusive cloud. Rather, a virtual private cloud describes an
arrangement where a single consuming organization—for example, a company or a
department within a company has exclusive use of the provider resources that deliver the
consumer’s services. These resources, however, reside in a data center or even on a
server that provides services to many other consuming organizations. An organization
implementing an exclusive cloud can hope to reduce both capital and operating expenses
for the consumer and to develop cloud partnering skills, such as securing consensus for
changes to the business or operational support system changes, defining security issues
and establishing cloud service level agreements. This cloud type requires differing levels
of trust, regulations concerning the physical location of data, as well as equitable cost
allocations. Providing capacity on demand for intermittent compute intensive workloads
such as sophisticated modeling to multiple universities is one example of an appropriate
use for an exclusive cloud. Other potential workloads could include industry-specific
applications shared by trade association members or analytics applications shared by
members of a research consortium.

• Open Cloud

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IBM white paper (2010, p3) discuss the open cloud to be as following. The consuming
and supplying organizations are unknown to each other prior to the presentation of a
service request. The primary factor distinguishing an open cloud is that the negotiation of
services must be an automated, standards-based event for which governance terms are
defined and controlled by the provider. Furthermore, the open cloud delivery model
requires automated negotiation and reconciliation of service levels, pricing and policies,
as well as automated policy enforcement. Services are typically ordered, fulfilled and
paid for over the Internet, in many cases without human intervention unless the consumer
initiates an inquiry or customer service transaction. This cloud type delivers value by
eliminating the upfront capital investment that the consumer would have to make to
deliver comparable computing resources in-house and by speeding implementation time
and realization of business benefits. While virtually any type of workload could be
processed in an open cloud, IBM’s (2010, p 4) analysis of barriers, drivers and consumer
preferences to identified specific infrastructure, platform and application workloads as
the most appropriate entry points for open public cloud delivery. In particular, the top
ranking workloads for open cloud included Web conferencing, service help desks, virtual
desktop applications such as customer relationship management, test environment
infrastructure and storage capacity.

3.3 Hybrid Cloud

Dillion et al (2010, p 28-29) mentions this architecture as a cloud infrastructure to be a


combination of two or more clouds that remain unique entities but are bound together by
standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability.
Organizations use the hybrid cloud model in order to optimize their resources to increase
code competencies by margining out peripheral business functions onto the cloud while
controlling core activities on-premise through private cloud. A hybrid cloud has raised the
issues of standardization and cloud interoperability that will be discussed in later sections.

Interestingly, Amazon Web Services (AWS) (Amazon S3,2008) has recently rolled out a new
type of deployment model – Virtual private cloud (VPC), a secure and seamless bridge

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between an organization’s existing IT infrastructure and the Amazon public cloud. This is
positioned as a mixture of between private cloud and public cloud. It is public because it still
uses computing resources pooled by Amazon for the general public. However, it is virtually
private for two reasons. Firstly, the connection between IT legacy and the cloud is secured
through a virtual private network, thereby having the security through a virtual private
network, thereby having the security advantage of private cloud. In fact, all corporate
security policies still apply to resources on the cloud even though it is on the public cloud.

Second, AWS will dedicate a set of ‘isolated’ resources to the VPC. However, this does not
mean users have to pay these isolated resources up-front. Users still enjoy “pay-per-use” on
these isolated resources. VPC represents a perfect balance between control and flexibility.

The service model is orthogonal to the deployment model. For example, a SaaS cloud
provisioned on a public cloud or a private cloud.

4. Adoption Issues

There are three types of potential users of cloud computing services: consumers, small
organizations, and medium to large organizations. Consumers and small organizations have
relatively simpler requirements for adopting a new technology than medium to large
organizations, and have much less to lose if the adoption goes awry. There are at least seven
types of adoption issues for cloud computing as to Kim et al (2009, p4). These include outage
(availability), security, performance, compliance, private clouds, integration, cost, and
environment. Of these, outage, security, and performance are quality of service (QoS) issues.
Only some of the adoption issues matter to consumers and small organizations. However, all of
them are of concern to medium to large organizations.

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4.1 Outage
An outage may be temporary and permanent. A permanent outage occurs when a cloud service
provider goes out of business. This has happened, and will happen again. Temporary outage of
cloud computing services appears to be inevitable. It may happen several times a year, and each
time it may last a few hours or nearly one full day or even longer. When large cloud services
become unavailable, there is a nearly instant and worldwide coverage of the outage. Such
services as Amazon, Google, Citrix, etc. have experienced highly publicized outages during the
past couple of years discussed in general by Hoover (2008) and Amazon S3 white paper (2008).
The users of a cloud service should exercise prudence, and take one or more of the following
precautions. First, they should not entrust absolutely mission-critical applications and data to the
cloud service providers; that is, they should use cloud services for non-mission-critical
applications and data. This explains the current uses of cloud services for Web site hosting,
software testing and online data backup. Second, they should keep backups of applications and
data on on-premises servers and storage, or on a secondary cloud service. Third, they should
secure as favourable a service-level agreement (SLA) as possible from the cloud service provider
for a favourable partial redress in case of temporary outages says Kim et al (2009, p4). We note
that none of these precautions is entirely satisfactory. The first limits the use of the cloud service.
The second and third erode the cost advantage of the cloud service. The third never fully
compensates for the actual damage.

4.2 Security
As to Kim et al (2009, p 28) the security of computer systems, and the data stored on them, can
be compromised in so many ways, 100% security is simply impossible. Sophisticated hackers
can break into just about any computer system. A cloud may become a “honey pot” that attracts
hackers. Accidents may happen during physical transportation or electronic transfer of a large
volume of data. Dishonest staff members may do bad things to the computer system or data. We
believe, however, that the clouds are not less secure than on premises computing systems. There
is no reason that the best security technologies and processes that can have been adopted for on
premises computing systems cannot be used by the cloud service providers.

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Further, the effects of security breaches on the cloud service providers are as great or even
greater than those on medium to large organizations. As such, the cloud service providers should
be highly motivated to do their best to secure their servers and data. The security measures that
Amazon Web Services employs may serve as a model for other cloud service providers. The user
can run his customized machine image with a full root access. The user can have his own ingress
firewall. The user can also have granular access control for every file. The user needs CERT, a
public key, a long ID string, a security ID to access Amazon’s resources (Amazon S3, 2008).

4.3 Performance
A major source of performance problem for cloud services is the communication time between
the client computer and the Web server in the cloud. This problem becomes serious as the
number of simultaneous users increases, and the amount of data transferred to and from the cloud
increases. Even the physical distance between the client computer and the cloud makes a
difference. Sometimes organizations discover the need to substantially increase the
communication bandwidth shortly after adopting cloud services as to Kim (2009, p3); Dillion
(2009, p233). Before adopting cloud services, organizations must assess the communication
bandwidth requirements, and evaluate the performance behaviour of the applications with respect
to transfer of large amounts of data.

Another source of performance problem is the inability for the service provider to scale up their
computing infrastructure as customer demands increase beyond the original expectation. Before
adopting cloud services, organizations must understand the service provider’s capacity
assumptions and scale-out plans regarding the computing infrastructure.

4.4 Compliance
Kim et al, (2009, p4); Botts et al (2010) discuss compliance issues in general. In the US,
enterprises are subject to some government regulations regarding the secure storage, privacy, and
disclosure of data. The regulations include Sarbanes-Oxley Act for corporate accounting data,
and HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) for people’s healthcare
insurance data. These regulations were written without consideration of cloud computing, that is,

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an enterprise storing data on a third-party computing facilities that are shared with other
enterprises. It is not clear if cloud computing will violate such regulations.

4.5 Private Clouds


A private cloud is an on-premises cloud Says Kim et al (2009); Botts (2010); Liu (2010). A
private cloud, except for its physical location, works just like a normal, or public, cloud. The
virtual machines and storage are created by virtualizing physical computing resources; and the
virtual computing resources are dynamically allocated and de allocated based on the needs of the
users. Further, the users or departments in the enterprise are charged for the services they
actually use. Since the term “cloud” was coined to refer to a remote third-party service provider,
the term “private cloud” is an oxymoron. Besides, one of the primary motivations for cloud
services has been touted as the freedom from having to administer on-premises computing
resources. A possible justification for the use of the term private clouds is the fact that a private
cloud is envisioned as a central cloud for an enterprise, and it is to be accessed by users in
different departments, as though it is a remote computing resource. In any case, the concept of
private clouds has gained grounds recently. Private clouds can serve as a halfway step before the
adoption of public cloud services. Enterprises can gain experience using cloud services, and
prepare their IT infrastructure and staff properly.

Further, enterprises can make use of hybrid cloud services based on their private clouds and
some public clouds. For example, when the capacity of the private cloud is exceeded, the
enterprise may tap into the public cloud. There are adoption issues for hybrid cloud services.
Today, if a workload is to be moved from a private cloud to a public cloud; both clouds require
the same hypervisor, the same chipsets for the servers, and the same file system. Further,
virtualization vendors have different virtual machine formats. To alleviate this problem,
the Distributed Management Task Force has proposed an Open Virtual Machine Format.

4.6 Integration
Since organizations may need to adopt multiple service providers to various reasons, they need
to integrate applications and data on multiple public clouds. Further, many organizations are

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likely to adopt hybrid clouds, they need to integrate applications and data between the private
clouds and the public clouds says Schwartz(2010);Kim et al (2009, p4).

Technologies such as enterprise information integration (or federated database systems),


enterprise application integration, and enterprise service bus can be adapted to address the cloud
integration issues.

4.7 Cost
Dillion (2010, p 30-31); Kim et al (2009, p4) discuss cost to be generally not regarded as an
adoption issue. People take the “only pay for what you use” part of the marketing definition of
cloud computing as a given. In the 1980s and 1990s, people took for granted about the promise
of cost savings in outsourcing software development from the US or Japan to countries such as
India, China, etc. The cost savings, while still significant, turned out to be much less than had
been presumed, because of the need to communicate between the two parties (e.g., travel,
stationing staff), to re-do work that was not done properly, gradual increase in fees charged, etc.

Similarly, the promised cost benefits of cloud computing are bound to be eroded. As observed
above, the need to maintain on premises backup or secondary cloud services in order to cushion
the impact of occasional outages certainly adds to the cost. The need to increase communication
bandwidth to maintain a desired performance level adds to the cost.

Further, the “remote administering of computing resources” part of the marketing definition of
cloud computing does not mean that organizations that adopt cloud services can totally depend
on the service providers for the administering of the applications, virtual machines and storage.
The organizations still need to monitor the performance and availability of the virtual computing
resources.

There are various monitoring tools, both commercial and open source. Monitoring requires staff
time, and possibly commercial tools. These add to the cost. IaaS service providers create virtual
computing resources out of physical computing resources, and allocate the virtual computing

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resources to different users. This means that multiple users share common physical computing
resources. Some organizations insist on having dedicated physical computing resources in the
cloud in order to prevent other “tenants” from possibly crossing paths. The use of dedicated
physical resources in the cloud can substantially erode the cost benefits of cloud computing.

4.8 Environment
A recent article in the Economist Kim et al (2009, p5) points out that the computers in the clouds
have been consuming megawatts of power at an ever-increasing rate, and that not all clouds are
built to the best energy-efficiency standards. So moving data centre operations from
corporations’ premises to the clouds are not reducing the global power consumption or the CO2
emission. The infrastructure service providers should be made to commit to increasing energy
efficiency in their data centre operations.

5. Business Process Management and Delivery Types

The business process management focuses on the integration, optimization, implementation,


monitoring and management of process. With SOA technology, the business process can be
dynamically adjusted as per the requirements of the businesses. The solutions of BPM includes:
development tool for users to personally define the model with basic components; business
performance management tool to manage and monitor IT system and the operation of the
business process.

The life cycle of business process management is as follows:

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Establish a model for the business process of enterprises with Business Process Execution
Language (BPEL), collect business functions from the existing system and release them under
the form of service, assemble the achieved component in the business process with the
corresponding released services, and then the enterprise business process based on the existing
system realization ability can be established. Arrange the assembled design business process
onto the BPEL Engine and then monitor and keep optimizing the business process through
monitoring software.

Figure 1: Referred by Fang 2010, p 332


5.1 Software as a service (SaaS)

Fang (2010, p329) argues SaaS as layer at the top layer of Cloud Computing, which is closest to users. It
is divided into application service and application software. The application service at the application
level is transparent to concrete realization, which mainly meets the concrete requirements of users and
application software. This layer provides the concrete process information and function realization
obtained from the business process and function service in PaaS for the application software at the upper
layer or directly provides them for the users through Internet service.

The ultimate application software of Cloud Computing is at the top, which is very strong for background
concurrent large-scale treatment. Dillion (2009, p29) Through the three-layer model of Cloud Computing

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and the core system of BPM in PaaS, BPM management software can conveniently collect the
information of business process and then develop, optimize and monitor the information.

The functions required for the whole framework is listed in Figure 1 (right), including real-time monitor
on each layer and module, dynamic configuration of system, service and process, usage-based charging
system, backstage management for a large number of users, and the management and maintenance on the
whole BPM and the life cycle of cloud computing environment.

Fang (2010, p 331) discuss SaaS as everyday Web users may be most familiar with the floor. The
application suitable for SaaS model resides on this service layer. They are some applications running in
the cloud and are provided to users in the form a service as per demand. Sometimes these services are
free, and the service providers can get income from online advertising and the like. Sometimes the
application providers are directly paid for the use of the service. As one kind of services, the software and
applications can be provided to users through Internet. In this mode, users do not need to install on their
computers and implement the applications. Therefore, SaaS reduces the burden on software maintenance
and even the purchase cost for customers. Gmail, Salesforce.com is typical software that is based on
Internet and can be used just with a browser.

5.2 Platform as a service (PaaS)

This layer from down to up includes: function service, business process engine, and business process.
This layer is the key element for the realization of BPM as to Fang (2010, p331). Function service can
obtain the services at the bottom layer released by other systems from the service bus in IaaS, and can
also independently realize functions. As a service component, the function service can be provided for
business process or the application service in SaaS. The business process engine is the execution
environment for business process, and the business object and business rule library are also available in
the engine. The business object is an abstract data object transmitted among the different components of
business process. Business rule library is used by the business analyst and designer.

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Since independent to any realization, the business rule library can dynamically change any rule standard
during operation. Business process is a simulation of the traditional enterprise businesses say Dillion
(2009, p 29). The result and process after the establishment of model can be described by BPEL. The
process logic can be realized by adopting different service components and rules. The software service in
SaaS can adopt business process to operate, monitor and manage the operation of the process.

In this layer, the application infrastructure can be considered as a set of services. This includes but not
limited to middleware as a service, messaging as a service, integration as a service, information as a
service, and connectivity as a service. The service here is mainly to support the application. These
applications can run in the cloud, and can also run in a more traditional corporate data center. In order to
achieve the required cloud scalability, different services are often provided by virtualization.

The examples of Cloud products include: Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure and so on. So far, Google
App Engine has provided two platforms of Python and Java. While the Microsoft Azure provides a
variety of different programming tools platforms for Azure Microsoft technologies under runtime
environment as to IBM(2010); Amazon S3(2010).

5.3 Infrastructure as a service

Kim (2009); Fang (2010) discuss IaaS in general to be a layer consisting virtual resources environment,
network & file storage system, and service bus. Above the hardware layer, it provides virtual abstract for
the traditional physical hardware and support the dynamic configuration of the virtualized hardware
facility. Besides, it realizes a distributed file storage system on the basis of virtual resources and forms an
abstract file system on various distributed physical machines through local area network, including such
functions as load balancing, fault tolerance treatment, dynamic node configuration and concurrent
treatment. Service bus is at the top part of IaaS layer, including the exterior services to be used, and the
function service released by the existing system. The service bus uniformly manages, inquires and
arranges these services through Web Service, WSDL, SOAP, and UDDI technologies. Therefore, the

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function service in PaaS can be realized under the uniform bus, increasing the transparency and making
maintenance much easier.

This is the lowest level of Cloud Computing that is closest to the hardware layer. Services in this layer
can be broken down as follows: set of physical resources and virtual resources in sets service. Main
functions include: starting and stopping their own resources, the operating system image, the network
topology of installation and system configuration. Physical resource layer depends on specific hardware
equipment, such as servers, networking equipment, and the storage disks to supply services to users. The
abovementioned services support application infrastructure (whether provided by the cloud or not) and
more users. The virtual resource layer can be built on an independent third-party hypervisor technology,
such as on top of Xen says Dragovic et al (2003, p23). As for platform services, the virtualization is to
provide a common method of resources distribution according to need. The examples for infrastructure
services include: IBM Blue House, Amazon EC2 and so on. Infrastructure services can correctly arrange
data center mainly through its demand-based computing power. In addition, this layer will use
virtualization technology, so with more efficient resource utilization, the cost can be controlled.

Conclusion

“Cloud” computing builds on decades of research in virtualization, distributed computing, utility


computing, and, more recently, networking, web and software services. It implies a service-oriented
architecture, reduced information technology overhead for the end-user, great flexibility, reduced total
cost of ownership, on demand services and many other things.

Further, in this literature review, we examined various issues that will impede rapid adoption of cloud
computing. The early euphoric expectation of huge cost benefits will surely be tempered. Even the
definition of cloud computing will undergo refinement. It has already been changed to allow for private

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clouds, and payment schemes that include annual contracts. Further, such issues as outage and security
are not likely to be fully resolved for all users.

However, we expect that cloud computing will become an important and viable step in the evolution of
information technology. We expect that IaaS services will be dominated by a fairly small number of large
vendors, such as Amazon, Google, IBM, HP, Sun, etc. However, there will surely be a very large number
of SaaS service providers. There will also be a large number of private clouds. A new IT ecosystem for
cloud computing will emerge that will include IaaS service providers; SaaS, CaaS and PaaS service
providers, some of which will provide their services on the virtual infrastructure they will buy from IaaS
service providers; cloud management service providers, including cloud monitoring and cloud integration
services; system integration service providers; consultancies and training service providers; etc.

This document discusses the concept of “cloud” computing, the issues it tries to address, related research
topics, and a “cloud” implementation technology. Limitations of this document is the lack of discussion
in strategies to implement cloud computing and adoption issues implementing cloud for a medium to
large organization. The goal of the research is to develop a framework to develop a framework to satisfy
implementation strategy of cloud to a medium to large organization.

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