Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
rules, as well as legal constraints both at national and international levels. The
generic VHE was tested with a use case in online gaming.
The two cases have the following common characteristics and problem areas:
• The need to establish quickly and efficiently in a trustable manner collaboration
with business partners, without centralising involved resources and data.
• No solution that provide support for efficient, secure and trustable sharing of
data and execution of collaborative business processes without fostering central-
ization of data and resources.
The two Business Experiments illustrated the potential for supporting VO based on
Grid and service orientation. Substantial benefits revealed were:
• Ad hoc establishment of VO among cooperating companies.
• Faster and more accurate establishment of a collaboration environment that takes
advantage of available core competencies, resources and services of involved
business partners and enables more efficient resource sharing and collaboration.
Similar to the application of HPC, the application of VO requires substantial
changes that need to be addressed by the involved organization. This includes the
overall decision for participation in VO, the decisions which data and in which form
it will be made available in a VO and which partners are suitable for a VO collabora-
tion. Closely related to this is the need to clearly define security policies regarding:
who can access the services, in which form services can be accessed, which services
are exposed in the environment, which data is exchanged, which SLAs and QoS are
required.
13.4 Summary and Conclusion
13.4.1 Summary of Findings
The Business Experiments presented in this topic illustrated two potential applica-
tion areas of Grid computing in companies:
• High performance computing (HPC) either through external utility computing
and SaaS or through internal Grids,
• Efficient inter-company collaboration and data and resource sharing within a
virtual organization (VO).
Both application areas revealed potential for substantial benefits:
• Improved core processes and tasks, which have strategic importance for the user
companies.
• Cut of infrastructure and maintenance costs and transfer of capital expenditures
in operational expenditures.
• Increased flexibility and scalability of available resources and by that increased
agility and flexibility of business processes.
