Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
8.7 Common Capabilities for Data and Service Portals
Portals are commonly used as a means of obtaining a unifying view of SOI and
Cloud platforms and of introducing transparencies that hide the complexity of the
underlying IT infrastructure. They include portals for managing user communities,
portals for accessing distributed data sources and portals for managing the life-cycle
of computational tasks (i.e. submitting, monitoring in real-time and controlling a
job). Many businesses considering investing in Grid or Cloud computing have busi-
ness needs relating to the use of such portals. Based on the analysis of their require-
ments (Dimitrakos et al. 2009a), the strongest business needs for technological
innovation in this area were organized in three sub-categories:
1. Security, user provisioning and user management
2. Efficiency and security of file and data sharing
3. Visibility and manageability of submitting, monitoring and controlling trans-
actions, jobs and other computational tasks
Typically, such business needs become even more critical in the case of cross-
organisational portals - i.e. portals shared among a community of business partners
(Virtual Organization), portals that offer access to shared resources, or portals that
offer access to federated services or resources offered by a Virtual Organisation.
Unfortunately, this is where most current solutions appear to be weaker.
The main research and development results in this area have taken the form
of extensions to a Plug & Play portals development framework (Dimitrakos et al
2009a) built on top of the Open Source Vine toolkit (Gridipedia 2009c). The key
innovations underpinning this result are a configurable abstraction layer that uses
Web2.0 mash-up technology to hide complexity of Grid computing tasks, and an
innovative user and account provisioning mechanism. This framework helps in
reducing integration costs and preserve existing investment by facilitating integra-
tion with existing solutions through a flexible plug-in adaptor mechanism. Ease of
integration with existing content management tools and legacy applications also
results in reducing the cycle time of Grid portal development projects. Finally the
user provisioning and administration mechanisms help reduce human error, coor-
dinate application-specific accounts and authentication mechanisms and results in
an easier to manage uniform administration layer. The high-level architecture of the
main capabilities developed for this framework is shown in figure 8.8.
Further studies (Brossard and Karanastasis 2009, Raekow et al. 2009) have
analyzed how this framework can be further enhanced through its integration with
other capabilities mentioned in this chapter. Brossard and Karanastasis (2009)
explore the added value of integrating this framework with the federated identity
and access management capabilities mentioned in previous sections. Raekow et al.
(2009) explore the added value of integration with the License Management capa-
bilities mentioned in previous sections of this chapter.
