Integrating the Cloud Scenarios and Solutions

Background

Cloud computing provides a number of benefits that act as key drivers for their adoption. These drivers include optimizing use of hardware infrastructure, offloading the burden of managing various computing resources and thus minimizing IT management overhead, reducing capital and operating costs by obtaining resources on a need to basis and paying for what is used, and ensuring business agility by dynamically meeting the IT needs of the business by scaling up or down to suit rapidly changing market demands of the consumer (Amrhein and Scott, 2009), (Plummer and Smith, 2009) and (Mell and Grance, 2009).

The above drivers have encouraged a number of organizations to adopt cloud computing as a paradigm for offering enterprise solutions.

As more and more enterprise applications are moved to the cloud infrastructure it will lead to a number of integration challenges. For example, organizations will still have a lot of business applications that are not moved to the “cloud” due to regulatory constraints such as HIPPA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), GLBA (Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act), and general security and NPPI (Non-Public Personal Information) issues. As a result, these on-premise applications have to be integrated with those in the cloud. Additionally, organizations must also face the challenge of integrating cloud-to-cloud applications. An example would be integrating a best of breed SaaS application (e.g. CRM) with another best of breed SaaS application (e.g. ERP).