Cloudware Operations and Management - Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers - page 378

The following components are required:
1. Service management : This is the most critical component of the cloud
service provider and performs the tasks related to service discovery,
service selection (in conjunction with other functions like seman-
tic engine and SLA and QoS management), service provisioning,
and service deprovisioning. The allocation of services is done in a
manner to preserve on-demand and elastic nature of cloud services
provisioning.
2. Metering/billing : This functionality keeps track of the services con-
sumed along with any aggregations and discounts and other pricing-
related information (in conjunction with rules management and
monitoring engine). This module may have integration with exter-
nal third-party payment gateways and will meter data from various
resources and aggregate them so that they can be rated and billed.
3. Data management : Also, an important functionality dealing with
data and their storage and security (in conjunction with integration,
transformation, security management, and SLA and QoS manage-
ment modules).
4. Monitoring : Monitors the business activities, SLAs, holistic service
status, outstanding alerts, and policy violations. This module inter-
faces with most other modules and provides them with relevant
information.
5. Security management : May include identity and access management
functionality for handling user roles and access issues and secu-
rity services like authentication, authorization, auditing, encryp-
tion, wire-level security, and other conventional security measures
required in a distributed environment. Privacy-related issues are
also handled by this module.
6. SLA and QoS management : Makes use of metrics in the relevant areas,
some of them being legal metrics, SLA, and QoS requirements per-
taining to regulatory, privacy, data security, and penalties manage-
ment; interfaces with the security management, policy management,
rules management, logging/audit trails, monitoring, and perfor-
mance management modules; defines metrics for usage and assess-
ment of charge-backs, promotions, and discount-related information
management.
7. Performance management : Handles the performance-related aspects
of business processes and services and also of the underlying
resources. It interfaces with certain other modules like monitoring
and support and incident management.
8. Policy management : Policy handling including policy creation and
assessment, mapping, attachment, and deployment is performed as