Cloud Computing

Next-generation data center management - the business case behind data center strategies is changing. Data centers represent a very logical starting point for a new consumer of cloud services, with relatively low risk and potentially significant cost savings and efficiency gains. Transitioning existing systems to the cloud offers opportunity to outsource non-core functions for most businesses. At the same time, it provides experience with a cloud-oriented way of organizing and accessing digital technology that is necessary to build out a roadmap for sensible cloud adoption. ōArchitectural planning, simplification, and transformation – Moving IT platforms to the clouds represents the next logical step in a serviceoriented world, and Build v. Buy v. Lease is the new decision framework in service selection within this context. Understanding the level of cloud and internal company maturity will guide decisions such as How and When to leverage cloud services to support core as well as non-core business capabilities, and how software assets should interoperate to provision business functionality. It is also critical in this step to give explicit focus to policy-based architectures that support agility and innovation.

Policy-oriented business and risk management – Policy within and across organization boundaries has traditionally been embedded within enterprise IT platforms and applications. However scaling businesses globally will require implementing new ways to combine and harmonize policies within and across external process networks and value chains. It will become increasingly critical for companies to establish clear and explicit definitions of governance, policy (regulatory, security, privacy, etc) and SLAs if they are to operate effectively with diverse entities in the cloud.

Cloud management – To conduct business within a cloud (recognizing what is available today), it is important for cloud consumers and providers to align on graduated SLAs and corresponding pricing models. Maturing cloud capabilities into more advanced offerings, such as virtual supply chains, requires support for fully abstracted, policy-driven interactions across clouds. This is a big jump, and it will become a major challenge for the cloud providers to adequately model, expose and extend policies in order to provide integrated services across distributed and heterogeneous business processes and infrastructure. The data associated with these business processes and infrastructure will need to be managed appropriately to address and mitigate various risks from a security, privacy, and regulatory compliance perspective. This is particularly important as intellectual property, customer, employee, and business partner data flows across clouds and along virtual supply chains.