A Practical Cloud Services Implementation Framework for E-Businesses

Background

Cloud computing has become a buzzword in the information world today and it refers to data center hosting of hardware and systems software, with applications available as services over the Internet (Rodero-Merino et al., 2010; Reese, 2009). With the current era of terabytes of data processing and demand for real-time IT solutions to challenges of ever-dynamic business environment, an evolution from Web services to grid services and now towards cloud services is very much likely (Miller, 2008; Clayman et al., 2010). While both grid and cloud concepts have the main objective of providing access to high-end computational power, storage resources and software systems, more recently, the trends seem to shift from grid computing towards cloud computing. This is due to the additional capabilities that clouds adopt, such as virtualization for providing on-demand services that are capable of facilitating dynamic scalability and heterogeneity. Such features aid in achieving maximum utilization of resources with minimum costs (Buyya et al., 2009). However, the proliferation of cloud services among potential users is very slow and currently enterprises have just started seriously looking into cloud computing as a means to save cost (Vaquero et al., 2011). There are fears and concerns with regard to migration, transparency, security, and control that impede the adoption of cloud services among individual users, businesses, and government agencies (Bisong & Rahman, 2011). There is insufficient understanding of cloud computing risk implications to businesses, and lack of generic framework for cloud adoption that could serve as guidelines for all types of consumers, including enterprises, application developers, and service providers (NIST Report, 2011). This chapter fills this gap to a certain extent with the main aim to enhance the awareness of risks associated with cloud computing, and to provide a strategic framework consisting of step-by-step guidelines that could pave the way towards a successful adoption of cloud services for e-businesses.