Commercial Use of WS-PGRADE/gUSE - Science Gateways for Distributed Computing Infrastructures - page 275

19.5 Conclusions

For small and mid-sized companies, the advantages of using cloud infrastructures are
evident. Cost effectiveness as well as low operational and administrative overhead
are the most important factors. Leveraging the competence of cloud operators,
backup and recovery of the system are straightforward. Additionally, these com-
panies could have access to almost unlimited computing and storage capacity.
However, the access to cloud infrastructures should be facilitated via used-
friendly interfaces that enable the utilization of cloud resources in a user-transparent
way. In this chapter three examples for providing commercial solutions for SMEs
via the WS-PGRADE/gUSE framework, and its capability to access heterogeneous
cloud resources through the CloudBroker platform, were illustrated. Utilizing the
Remote API or the ASM API of the framework enables companies to develop
commercial solutions that run computation, or data-intensive applications as SaaS
on various clouds. As these

first examples illustrate, the WS-PGRADE/gUSE
framework is not only an academic solution but can also be successfully exploited
in commercial scenarios.