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Cloud Computing

Pethuru Raj Chelliah, IBM Bangalore, India

IT advancements directly influence a business’s agility and affordability. This survey of the transformations, disruptions, and innovations brought about by pioneering cloud concepts sheds light on the tremendous foundation in place for realizing and sustaining smarter enterprises.

Recently, a bevy of disruptive and trans­formative technologies in the IT domain have emerged,1 streamlining the realization of real­time business, analytical,

social, and people­centric applications. Such applications have led to the development of adaptive software, social networking sites, smart spaces, and knowledge societies. The future seems bright as well—for example, auto­identification tags carrying our personal profiles and preferences will digitally map to and merge with personal and professional devices and software systems to understand our needs and address them in a timely manner. Perhaps our daily artifacts will be digitally empowered to be smart in terms of their operation and output.

This purpose­specific transition is possible by internally embedding functional modules inside of ordinary objects and by externally attaching ultra­small

computers, communicators, sensors, and actuators to the outside of them. Our coffee cups, din­ner plates, tablets, and clothes, for example, will be empowered to act intelligently in their dealings with other products in the vicinity and even with humans. All tangible items will be transitioned into smart and sentient digital entities—future generations will experience and realize completely new technology­sponsored and enhanced living. The impact of IT in our lives will become bigger yet calmer.

The technologies for enabling minimization, in­tegration, federation, virtualization, sensing, percep­tion, analytics, and so on are quickly maturing. The resulting systems and solutions will disappear into the background and will be disposable, affordable, connected, dependable, people­centric, and con­text­aware. This technology­driven, seamless, and spontaneous integration of digitalized materials at

Elucidating the Cloud Enterprise Architecture for Smarter Enterprises

AdvAncing cloud computing

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the ground (physical) level with scores of enterprise software packages at the cyber level will produce a stream of adaptive, mission­critical, and secure ap­plications and services for business IT. Business ventures are already embracing competent technol­ogies (the most prevalent and popular being service orientation, cloud and big data computing, enter­prise mobility, and real­time analytics) to maintain their edge. In this article, I describe how enterprise­scale technologies, architectures, processes, and in­frastructures are building a strong and stimulating foundation for smarter enterprises.

Envisioning Smarter EnterprisesEnterprise architecture (EA) is defined by the MIT Center for Information Research as “the organizing logic for business processes and IT infrastructure reflecting the integration and standardization requirements of the company’s operating model. The operating model is the desired state of business process integration and business process standardization for delivering goods and services to customers” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Center_for_Information_Systems_Research).

Any enterprise that leverages its prime assets (business data and IT infrastructures) efficiently and effectively is bound to be smarter in its outlook and output.2 Worldwide, business enterprises strive to be significantly ahead of their competitors, with executives, entrepreneurs, and other important stakeholders continuously formulating pragmatic, pioneering schemes to maintain any footholds gained through business and IT solutions and services. Some organizations even employ well­known consulting organizations to create a roadmap for quickly obtaining their business vision in a risk­free fashion. The most common objectives are to become smarter in terms of operating models, customer interactions, and the proactive and preemptive introduction of premium solutions. Widely accepted methods for building sustainable and smarter enterprises include

• optimizing business operations,• analyzing data to transform it into useful busi­

ness information, and • simplifying data access and consumption.

Furthermore, these methods can be achieved by

• data asset exploitation,• process excellence,

• infrastructure optimization,• architecture assimilation,• technology adoption, and• enterprise mobility.

When enterprises consistently focus on these things, they have a good chance of being strategically smarter in their activities. A culture of innovation will pervade, making those enterprises more pragmatic in anticipating and visualizing customers’ requirements and quickly addressing the identified needs.

The business landscape itself is continuously changing. Organizations are expanding their horizons of activities, exploring new avenues for higher revenues, experimenting with nimbler technologies and techniques, espousing original and optimal business models, and expounding every opportunity—no matter how small. As business expectations consistently climb, there’s a greater dependency on and demand for insightful innovations in IT to continually automate, accelerate, and augment the business. Furthermore, with the recovering global economy, executives and entrepreneurs are demanding more decisive and drastic outputs through systematized and smart investments in IT adaption and adoption. To achieve this, experts and evangelists alike insist on an integrated and insightful approach to business and IT. Suppose a corporation wants to introduce a new product into its portfolio. It must define additional business processes, hire extra personnel, change the supporting applications and dependencies, and augment the technical infrastructure to support the additional load. This new initiative might lead to sharp changes in the organizational structure as well.

Leveraging IT advancements to shape up business automation, optimization, and trans­formation is a tedious and time­consuming task that requires a lot of brainstorming, strategizing, and planning, followed by smart actuation. IT capabilities must be weighed objectively, and the resulting knowledge has to be deposited safely for future access. Executives need to be in a position to make appropriate decisions quickly. All these criteria mandate an integrated vision and mission to ensure that business is IT­aware and that IT is business­aware. Without such a mechanism in place, businesses might not profit from the series of innovations happening in the IT domain. Business

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and IT strategies must be intertwined to be relevant in the changing marketplace. This synchronization will create new opportunities.

Because EA is an enterprise­scale, logical, and holistic approach, it’s the most efficient and effective way to attain this alignment. Its coherent set of principles, methods, guidelines, best practices, and models are used in the design and realization of the enterprise’s organizational structure and behavior, business processes, enterprise building blocks, information systems, and infrastructures. Several EA frameworks specify a multitude of templates, checklists, suggestions, metrics, key guidelines, tool selection criteria, and patterns for greatly simplifying the increasing workloads of enterprise architects.

The Emergence of Cloud Enterprise ArchitectureBusiness­driven technologies have recently emerged to address the enterprise’s unique needs. Service­oriented architecture (SOA) is the most widely used architectural pattern, with its potential for producing mission­critical, modular, adaptive, and enterprise­class applica­tions. Such service­based thinking permeates throughout the enterprise, not only resulting in service­based systems engineering but also often fulfilling goals of business integration, enterprise composition, and legacy modernization as well.

Another concept spanning the entire IT industry is that of cloud computing. While the service paradigm targets software design and development, the cloud idea supports it exceedingly well through deployment, delivery, and management. Big data computing is a more recent phenomenon and is viewed as the best bet for extracting actionable insights from distributed and diverse data in real time. Data­crunching frameworks simplify this knowledge extraction, thereby enabling enterprises to make strategic decisions.

Today, SOA, cloud computing, and mobile computing, in association with the big data movement, are the leading EA­enablement technologies. SOA represents the architectural pattern; the cloud represents the infrastructure optimization; mobility represents the anytime, anywhere, any device access; and big data represents virtualization and visualization. EA is the unifying factor for the technology clustering, process innovation, centralized (as well as federated)

infrastructure, and architecture simplifications With seamless cloud incorporation, process engineering will increasingly involve seismic shifts toward the much­anticipated promise of process excellence. The concept of cloud EA (CEA) represents this transition.

The Evolving Cloud ParadigmThe trend­setting cloud paradigm represents the conglomeration of several enterprise­scale, mission­critical, state­of­the­art technologies, including virtualization, SOA, software as a service, autonomic, utility, on­demand, and cluster or grid computing models. Although the cloud idea isn’t new conceptually, its seamless synchronization has ushered in myriad shifts in IT infrastructure optimization. The cloud­induced implications for IT have started to impact the business side of the enterprise, too: business agility, adaptability, affordability, sustainability, efficiency, and resiliency are changing with the consistent incorporation of cloud technology.

Cloud computing involves several deployment, delivery, consumption, and pricing models. The cloud and SOA paradigms have combined well to simplify application design, development, assembly, enhancement, and management, with the most noteworthy contributions being the faster realization and proliferation of dynamic, converged, adaptive, on­demand, and online IT infrastructures (server, storage, and networking solutions). Other distinctions include the fact that clouds easily guarantee several nonfunctional requirements—primarily, quality­of­service attributes—such as availability, throughput, performance, on­demand scalability and elasticity, affordability, global­scale accessibility and usability, and energy efficiency.

Now that business executives and entrepreneurs understand the exceptional functionalities and features of cloud infrastructures, they have embarked on steadily modernizing their IT resources to be packaged and presented as network­accessible and cloud­hosted services that can be publicly and dynamically found, bound, and used by worldwide users for a small fee. This transition could facilitate a higher and deeper reach and richness in application construction, delivery, and consumability. Product vendors—having found that the cloud style is a unique proposition—are moving their platforms (development,

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AdvAncing cloud computing

execution, integration middleware, management, database systems, and so on) to clouds. Likewise, infrastructure providers are re­architecting their datacenters to be next­generation cloud centers or are establishing cloud centers from scratch to optimally host a variety of services and platforms for both individuals and institutions.

Cloud service providers are very aggressive in experimenting with the growing array of business and technical services hosted in their clouds for global customers and consumers. On­premise and local applications are going online, becoming on­demand and moving off­premise. In addition to the modernization of legacy applications, fresh offerings are being designed solely for use in clouds. As the cloud space is solidifying, personal and professional services are increasingly relocating to cloud platforms—eventually, richer content and social, embedded, mobile, and other specific applications will be housed in clouds as well. Well­known enterprise information systems such as enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, human resources management, and supply­chain management solutions are already finding success in clouds.

The Grandiose Implications of CEAThere’s no doubt that the implications of evolving cloud concepts for EA will be game­changing. Apart from key architectural domains, such as cloud­enabled data, application, technology, and business architectures, the synchronization of transformative and disruptive cloud technology with strategically sound EA concepts has created new propositions, such as cloud­instigated security, management, governance, and integration architectures. But other opportunities for businesses, where the cloud meets EA, will disrupt business­as­usual operational models. The cloud, being such a powerful technology, is capable of producing more value for those business organizations that want to tackle new challenges. Fortunately, there are plenty of suggestions for risk­free, smooth migrations of traditional on­premise applications and data to off­premise cloud­based environments based on practical, related experiences.

In the coming years, disappearing computers, communicators, sensors, and robots will instruct, instigate, alert, and facilitate smarter decision­making. Humanized robots will help fulfill our daily physical chores—that is, computers of different

sizes, with capabilities and interfaces, will be fitted, glued, and inserted everywhere to be supportive yet invisible. Internet of Things technologies, synched up with cloud infrastructures, will result in people­centric smarter environments.

Smarter EnvironmentsThe cloud will have a definite impact on both our recreational and working hours, with many spaces filled with a variety of electronics, such as envi­ronment­monitoring sensors, actuators, monitors, controllers, and processors.3 Apart from these, all physical items will transform into computation­ and communication­enabled smart artifacts by having specially made electronics attached to them. Whenever we walk into empowered and augment­ed environments saturated with digitalized objects, the devices we carry and even our clothes will en­ter into a calm yet logical collaboration mode and form wireless ad hoc networks with that environ­ment. For example, if someone wants to print a document from his or her smartphone or tablet when entering a room with a printer, the smart­phone will begin a conversation with the printer automatically, check its competencies, and send the documents to be printed. The smartphone will also alert its owner.

Energy EfficiencyAs long as there’s a continued rise in energy con­sumption (and the resulting heat dissipation to the extremely fragile environment), there’s an open call for energy conservation to proactively save the environment for future generations. IT is one of the principal culprits because of how it wastes scarce energy through servers and connected de­vices. Statistical reports convey the message that datacenters consume a lot of electricity, which led to the rise of green IT as a hot subject for study and research across the globe. Newer and nimbler platforms, such as smart metering and grids, have emerged and are making a dent in the problem. There’s also a renewed focus on the Internet of Energy concept, which aims to develop a smart, electronic network for coordinating all compo­nents in an energy system for optimal output from scarce resources.

Enhanced CareNext­generation healthcare services demand deeply connected solutions—for example, for

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lonely, elderly, debilitated, or chronically ill people, the need for remote monitoring and coordinated diagnosis, care, management, and entertainment goes up sharply. Through IT solutions, medical doctors can remotely monitor their patients’ health parameters, and people can track their own progress in fitness routines. Making decisions becomes easy and timely with the prevalence of connected solutions that benefit knowledge workers and patients alike. With secondary and peripheral needs accomplished in an unobtrusive manner, people can better focus on their core activities.

Remote Monitoring and ManagementWith the number of devices in our personal and professional environments growing in an unprecedented fashion, their real­time administration, configuration, activation, monitoring, management, and repair eases considerably with remote connectivity and correction competency. Through this type of capability, enterprises, hospitals, factories, and other large organizations can accurately track the locations of high­value equipment, doctors and patients, vehicles, and so on.

Smart EnterprisesThe cloud paradigm is slated to bring strategic transformations to how businesses are run. The business operating model will be subjected to a series of tests and simulations to identify glaring gaps and identify viable solutions. Business data (customers, products, transactions, operations, sales, and so on) is the prime asset to be leveraged effectively to generate real­time business intelligence, which in turn enables decision­makers to plan appropriately in a risk­free manner. Finally, the customer experience expressed through formal and informal feedback about various business offerings must be analyzed to ensure repeat business. Cloud IT ensures informative and intuitive interfaces for simplifying and streamlining the process of discovering, accessing, and using business functionalities and facilities for worldwide consumers and clients.

The emergence of the Internet of Things dis­cipline is bringing more solidity and success in establishing smarter enterprises (for more in­formation, see www.iot­a.eu/public). As every common thing gets digitalized and interconnected with other objects in the vicinity as well as with remotely hosted (cloud) applications via networks,

extreme connectivity and service enablement will collectively produce insights that will strengthen smarter enterprises. Figure 1 illustrates how these technological innovations, in concert with EA concepts, are laying a strong foundation for real­izing smarter enterprises.

I t’s clear that all kinds of promising tech nologies are driving the latest round of transitions and transformations—and not only technologies

but also processes, architectures, and infrastruc­tures are being subjected to a variety of checks and refinements to make them compatible with the EA vision. The real and sustainable transformation most businesses are experiencing is being realized through the smarter and systematic usage of con­sistently evolving EA concepts.

References 1. P.R. Chelliah, Cloud Enterprise Architecture, CRC Press,

2012. 2. “View Point: Smarter Organizations,” Infosys,

Sept. 2011; www.infosys.com/building­tomorrows­ enterprise/Documents/smarter­organizations.pdf.

3. M. Chui, M. Löffler, and R. Roberts, “The Internet of Things,” McKinsey Quarterly, Mar. 2010; www. mckinsey.com/insights/high_tech_telecoms_internet/the_internet_of_things.

Pethuru Raj Chelliah is a cloud architect in the IBM global cloud center of excellence (CoE) at IBM Banga-lore. His research interests include SOA, cloud computing, e-governance, enterprise architecture, big data analytics, and the Internet of Things. Chelliah received a PhD in computer science from Anna University, Chennai, India. Contact him at peterindia@gmail.com.

Figure 1. The transformative power of technologies in realizing futuristic and flexible enterprise architectures.

Enterprise space

Embedded space

Cloud space

Integration bus

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