Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
more flexible and agile infrastructures that can support new and innovative business
strategies in shorter time scales.
In response to such customer needs and insights, this experiment has developed
the VHE proposition. The VHE offers the potential to treat both IT and business
functions as a series of interconnected services. It is an attempt to offer organi-
sations new ways to selectively outsource, to quickly configure and reconfigure
these services and to continually maximize efficiency, even as their business world
changes. VHE is an enhanced Service Oriented Infrastructure (SOI) that is built on
the fusion of:
• The SOA for ensuring composition of loosely coupled services
• The virtualisation and distributed management of ICT resources based on Grid
computing
• The management of Network resources based on a federated architecture.
The pull for the VHE has mainly come from two areas: the need for enterprises to
become more flexible in order to adapt to evolving business models leading to new
revenue-generating opportunities and the increasing pressure to reduce operating
costs.
Other reasons come from the need to reduce organisations' environmental impact
by reducing energy consumption as stated in Wall Street & Technology (2009).
Between the completion of this experiment in June of 2008 and now, the Grid
SOA paradigm has evolved into the Cloud computing proposition. Many leading
IT organisations including telecommunications providers such as BT and Orange
are investing in Cloud computing proposals. Indeed, Gartner predict 22% growth
in 2009, with revenues reaching $9.6bn and rising to $16bn by 2013 in the Cloud
computing market (MicroScope 2009). A trend toward Cloud computing is to be
expected in the light of the challenges faced by major Wall St firms. The VHE
approach taken in this experiment has been built in such a flexible way that it can be
easily migrated towards a Cloud approach with little or no effort.
Cloud computing will also impact security services because we expect to see a
new Security-as-a-Service model emerge. With technology dissolving traditional
network boundaries and companies changing their operational business models,
Cloud-based security will be essential. The work in identity and access manage-
ment done in BEinGRID and this experiment fit naturally into the Cloud.
The results of this experiment are extremely encouraging. There is a very
dynamic market with very high expectations for new SOA-oriented visions in order
to pursue new business opportunities, cut IT operation costs, and fuel the corpo-
rate green agenda which is becoming important in Corporate Social Responsibility
(CSR) strategies. We believe large IT corporations (consultancy firms, telecommu-
nications providers) should lead the way into the Cloud computing paradigm. The
partners of this experiment and in particular ATOS and BT can leverage the results
of this experiment to strengthen their respective proposals.
