The Business Perspective on Cloud Computing - A Literature Review of Research on Cloud Computing

This literature review synthesized the existing research on cloud computing from a business perspective by investigating 60 sources. It integrates their results in order to offer an overview about the existing body of knowledge. Using an established framework our results are structured according to the four dimensions following: cloud computing characteristics, adoption determinants, governance mechanisms, and business impact. This work reveals a shifting focus from technological aspects to a broader understanding of cloud computing as a new IT delivery model. There is a growing consensus about its characteristics and design principles. Unfortunately, research on factors driving or inhibiting the adoption of cloud services, as well as research investigating its business impact empirically, is still limited. This may be attributed to cloud computing being a rather recent research topic. Research on structures, processes and employee qualification to govern cloud services is at an early stage as well

Quality of Service Contract Specification, Establishment, and Monitoring for Service Level Management

This paper describes a Quality of Service (QoS) management approach and architecture as well as a case study for Service Level Management (SLM). Our approach brings in a new perspective to the SLM probem by using QoS management and QoS Contract specification, establishment, and monitoring. In SLM, the service consumer side and the service provider side must share a common understanding of QoS characteristics and use a common language for specifying desired QoS parameters in the form of QoS contracts. A service consumer must negotiate with the service provider to establish mutually agreed QoS contracts for an interaction session. When establising a new QoS contract, the service provider must consider both QoS contracts already agreed upon with existing consumers and system resource conditions. Similarly, a service consumer must be prepared in revising its contract with the service provider as conditions change over time. Once a QoS contract is established, SLM must monitor QoS status to make sure that the service quality is provided at the agreed range. If necessary, SLM must activate adaptation mechanisms to bring the service quality to the desired level. A case study is presented in this paper to validate the QoS contract management design approach and architecture for SLM.

A model for the development of service agreements in the Information and Communication Technology sector

SAs are documents that specify the business relationship between stakeholders to an outsourcing agreement. SAs specify this relationship in a legally binding manner that assists in managing expectations of the stakeholders about the service provision. According to Verma (1999), an SA is a precise statement of the expectations and obligations that exist in a business relationship between two organisation: the service provider and the client. In order for organizations to have successful outsourcing partnerships, they need well crafted methods of developing Service Agreements (SAs). Successful methods will produce a conclusive contract that will act as a working document that details the spirit of cooperation between the service provider and the service recipient. This research investigates the development of SAs in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector, and proposes a model for their development. A number of models for SA development have been analysed. Models are analysed from leading researchers in the area, from software houses such as Microsoft and from international standards organisations such as the BS15000 which stipulates the ITIL framework. Eight development principles are identified and explored. An investigation into SAs and their development is conducted. A model is proposed that is composed of the development principles. The development of SAs was explored in an empirical study by means of a survey administered to industry practitioners and a series of interviews with managers in the ICT industry. The results of the study indicate varying levels of support for the development principles and limited relationship between the development principles and the success of the SA, as defined by the number of changes made to the SA after it is completed

Geospatial Inference and Management of Utility Infrastructure Networks

Ph. D. Thesis.Modern cities consist of spatially and temporally complex networks that connect urban infrastructure assets to the buildings they service. Critical infrastructure networks include transport, electricity, water supply, waste water and gas, all of which play a key role in the functioning of modern cities. Understanding network spatial connectivity, resource flow, dependencies and interdependencies is essential for infrastructure planning, management, and assessment of system robustness and resilience. However, there is a sparsity of fine spatial scale data from which such understanding can be derived or inferred. Often data is held within commercially sensitive organisations and may be incomplete topologically and/or spatially. Thus, there is an urgent need to develop new approaches to the integrated inference, management and analysis of the complex utility infrastructure networks. Such approaches should allow the highly granular representation of utility network connectivity to be represented in a spatially explicit manner, employing methods of data and information management to ensure they are scalable and generic. This thesis presents the development of such an approach, one that employs a geospatial ontology to formally define the key entities, attributes and relationships of fine spatial scale utility infrastructure networks. This ontology is used as the conceptual framework for the development of a suite of algorithms that allow the heuristic inference of the spatial layout of utility infrastructure networks for any urban conurbation within the UK. This is demonstrated via several case studies where the electricity feeder network between substations and buildings is generated for several different cities within the UK. Validation against the known network for the city of Newcastle upon Tyne indicates that the network can be inferred to high levels of accuracy (about 90%). Moreover, the algorithm is shown to be a transferable to the inference and integration of other utility infrastructure networks (gas, water supply, waste water, and new road layouts). ii The representation, management and analysis of such spatially complex and large utility networks is, however, a major challenge. The efficient storage, management and analysis of such spatial networks is explored via a comparison of a traditional RDMS approach (PgRouting within Postgres), spatial database (PostGIS) and a NoSQL graph-database (Neo4j), as well as a bespoke hybrid spatial-graph framework (combination of PostGIS and Neo4j). A suite of comparison tests of data writing, data reading and complex network analysis demonstrated that significant performance benefits in the use of the NoSQL graph database approach for data read (around 210% faster) and network analysis (between 420 and 1170 % faster). However, this was at the expenses of data writing which was found to be between 135 and 150% slower.MISTRAL project, School of Engineering at Newcastle University