Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
to offer and measure different levels of QoS based on pre-agreed Service-Level
Agreement (SLA) contracts.
The solution put forward should enable each organisation using a Service-
Oriented Infrastructure (SOI) to define its own policies to drive their infrastructure.
The solution should bring visibility into the execution of these policies. It should
also bring visibility and ease-of-management into organisations' relationships with
customers, suppliers, and partners.
The solution should be able to leverage existing third-party VAS such as SLA
and security services. In particular, it should guarantee QoS to the end customer
along with correct billing and QoS measurements. In addition to being able to
connect to VAS, the solution should enable organisations to offer their own internal
capabilities as VAS: the architecture should enable the secure and controlled expo-
sure of in-house software as services to external customers following the Software-
as-a-Service (SaaS) paradigm.
From a core infrastructure perspective, the solution should enable a scalable,
extensible, and manageable system capable of reducing IT cost through service
reuse and optimization. To achieve this, the architecture should offer a manageable
hosting environment where applications can be contextualized, virtualized, and run
on the most adequate hosts. It should be possible to combine these environments in
clusters or matrixes to provide increased performance. These environments should
be highly configurable and manageable to give the end-user (an organisation using
these resources) maximized control over its services.
From a security perspective, the solution should support the operation and life-
cycle management of trust federations of common capabilities (CC) and business
services. By federation, we mean an aggregation of users and services together with
an underpinning circle of trust defining the relationship between the different partic-
ipating partners.
The solution should enable a management and governance model that spans
across layers and organisational boundaries in order to achieve a correct picture of
the infrastructure, its state, and the services exposed. The governance framework
should enable the ability to manage the full policy lifecycle. It should provide the
means to audit policies and sub-systems and should be able to prove the compliance
of the solution with local regulations, corporate rules, as well as legal constraints
both at national and international levels.
Applied to the Online Gaming scenario, these requirements confirm the trend
identified in Total Telecom Magazine (2009). Game developers should focus on
editing and developing games while buying or renting hosting resources from
specialists e.g. Amazon EC2 (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/). This also confirms
the model identified by McAfee. SMEs will either not understand the risks linked
with online business models or will not have the means and dedication to invest
in an adequately secure infrastructure in order to ensure its business is adequately
protected.
The requirements are further detailed in Brossard et al. (2008), Brossard and
Prieto MartÃnez (2009) and Dimitrakos et al. (2009b).
