A Governance Based Architecture for Enterprise Cloud Computing Adoption

Introduction

In both changing and volatile world, Enterprise seems to be ostensibly and in different manners, up to the performance climax. Accordingly, the technological core enhances this fact by the adoption and the delivery of novelty. Sometimes this is taken as a fashionable parameter, for a mere trendy purpose and not for operational needs. As a case in point, Cloud computing is a highly advanced performance on computing system, that over the past few years, the big Cloud providers seek to endorse its adoption, not merely as a necessity, but also as the future proactive solution.

Cloud Computing is a promising approach for implementing a new IT ecosystem (Kim et al, 2009), highly scalable for individual-, community-, and business-use (Brandic et al, 2010), that brings together a set of existing technologies to run business in a different way (Zhang et al, 2010) like Virtualization, Web, Scale-out, and Infrastructure hardware and software technologies (Kim et al, 2009).

In (Lin and Chen, 2012), interviewees affirm that “we do not use cloud just because it is the Cloud”. By this, moving to the cloud is not a simple decision and would not be a case to be tackled. Because, the benefits of cloud solutions are not widely realized in practice (Lin and Chen, 2012) and cost saving estimates that are often cited by cloud providers cannot be generalized across all IT systems (Khajeh-Hosseini et al, 2012) and can only be realized for a specific classes of companies (Lin and Chen, 2012), e.g. the new ones. Nevertheless, with the focus in the financial advantages, the notion of Governance is out of Cloud priorities discussion. When the Users change to Choosers (Yanosky, 2008; Khajeh-Hosseini et al, 2012), and business unit personnel can bypass IT department and receive services directly from the providers (ISACA, 2009), it is the whole corporate governance which is compromised.

Throughout the course of the evolution of the Cloud Computing, we assume that the IT Governance should be taken into account. As it offers a new concept of computing, the governance has to follow, and should be easy to implement and simple to use. Differently to the traditional IS environment, the virtual environment is more complex to govern, due to its pervasive and multi-protagonist nature. So, a new concept of governing has to take place so as to fit with cloud characteristics and to satisfy its requirement. Striving to get this challenge occur, we propose a Governance based Architecture for Enterprise Cloud Computing Adoption that act in the different phases' of the Cloud lifecycle: choosing, implementing, monitoring and eventually migrating. To underpin our approach, we will firstly highlight the Cloud state-of-art, its requirements and challenges. Secondly, we will present in details the Architecture with its different features. Thirdly, we will shed light on the impacts of the architecture in the discussion part. Then finally, we will sum up with a deduction and a set of future works.