Cooperative Hybrid Cloud Intermediaries - Making Cloud Sourcing Feasible for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises

"The cloud" is widely advertised as a silver bullet for many IT-related challenges of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). While it can potentially have a number of attractive benefits, many SMEs refrain from using cloud sourcing and cloud services because of high upfront costs for building the appropriate knowledge in the enterprise, for searching and screening of possible cloud service providers, and for mastering the intricate legal issues related to outsourcing sensitive data. This paper presents the concept of hybrid cloud intermediaries, an approach that can address many of the prevailing issues. With the aid of empirical findings from a cross-nation study of cloud adoption in SMEs for context, we describe the concept in detail and show conceivable variants, including a comprehensive cross-perspective consolidated model of cloud intermediary value-creation. Subsequently, we analyze the benefits of such a hybrid cloud intermediary for addressing cloud adoption issues in SMEs, and suggest suitable governance structures based on the cooperative paradigm. The resulting entity - a cooperative hybrid cloud intermediary or, more concisely, co-op cloud - is discussed in detail showing both feasible scenarios and limitations for SMEs that would like to engage in a cloud-sourcing

Fog computing: Will it be the future of cloud computing?

Cloud computing is the newest computing paradigm that makes computing resources available over the Internet on a utility costing basis.Cloud computing offers many advantages to users in terms of reduced cost, elimination of system administrative functions, increased flexibility, better reliability and location independence. Though these are definite advantages, cloud computing also suffers from certain limitations.These limitations arise from the very same reason that is considered an advantage too.Hosting of cloud data centres in the Internet creates large and unpredictable network latencies and undefined security issues as sensitive data is now entrusted to a third party. Also location independence of processing in cloud computing may also not desirable for certain types of networks such as sensor networks and Internet of Things.These services are known as location aware services and require location dependent fast processing.In order to overcome these limitations, researchers have proposed a new cloud computing model called fog computing where the cloud system is located either at the edge of the private network or very close to it. In this paper, the authors take an in depth look at both these technologies to investigate fog computing can reliably overcome the limitations of cloud computing and effectively replace it and become the de facto cloud computing model of the future

Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Production Systems and Logistics (CPSL 2021)

Proceedings of the CPSL 202

System of Systems Lifecycle Management: A New Concept Based on Process Engineering Methodologies

In order to tackle interoperability issues of large-scale automation systems, SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) principles, where information exchange is manifested by systems providing and consuming services, have already been introduced. However, the deployment, operation, and maintenance of an extensive SoS (System of Systems) mean enormous challenges for system integrators as well as network and service operators. The existing lifecycle management approaches do not cover all aspects of SoS management; therefore, an integrated solution is required. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new lifecycle approach, namely the SoSLM (System of Systems Lifecycle Management). This paper first provides an in-depth description and comparison of the most relevant process engineering methodologies and ITSM (Information Technology Service Management) frameworks, and how they affect various lifecycle management strategies. The paper’s novelty strives to introduce an Industry 4.0-compatible PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) model and to extend it to cover SoS management-related issues on well-known process engineering methodologies. The presented methodologies are adapted to the PLM model, thus creating the recommended SoSLM model. This is supported by demonstrations of how the IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) applications and services can be developed and handled. Accordingly, complete implementation and integration are presented based on the proposed SoSLM model, using the Arrowhead framework that is available for IIoT SoS. View Full-Tex

Logic-based Technologies for Intelligent Systems: State of the Art and Perspectives

Together with the disruptive development of modern sub-symbolic approaches to artificial intelligence (AI), symbolic approaches to classical AI are re-gaining momentum, as more and more researchers exploit their potential to make AI more comprehensible, explainable, and therefore trustworthy. Since logic-based approaches lay at the core of symbolic AI, summarizing their state of the art is of paramount importance now more than ever, in order to identify trends, benefits, key features, gaps, and limitations of the techniques proposed so far, as well as to identify promising research perspectives. Along this line, this paper provides an overview of logic-based approaches and technologies by sketching their evolution and pointing out their main application areas. Future perspectives for exploitation of logic-based technologies are discussed as well, in order to identify those research fields that deserve more attention, considering the areas that already exploit logic-based approaches as well as those that are more likely to adopt logic-based approaches in the future

Industrialization in Cloud Computing with Enterprise Systems: Order-to-Cash Automation for SaaS Products

Industrialization has led to efficiency and effectiveness gains in manufacturing industries. Industrialization approaches such as standardization or sourcing are also key concepts in modern service companies. Therefore, current IS research studies how to transfer industrialization approaches to IT service production in order to increase efficiency and effectiveness. Automated and integrated value creation, as supported by ERP systems, have only been limitedly researched in the context of IT service production, although companies see this as an important area of improvement. In this paper, a model of how to automate and integrate an order-to-cash process for providers who offer SaaS products is proposed. The focus lies on the service provisioning process step and the model is evaluated with a prototype implementation. This research has implications for researchers and practitioners alike, as it proposes how to more effectively and efficiently deliver IT services, and use established IS research to do so

Proceedings of the Conference on Production Systems and Logistics: CPSL 2022

[no abstract available