Cloud computing in June 2012 

Though the concept of “clouds” is not new, it is undisputable that they have proven a major
commercial success over recent years and will play a large part in the ICT domain over the next 10
years or more, as future systems will exploit the capabilities of managed services and resource
provisioning further. Clouds are of particular commercial interest not only with the growing
tendency to outsource IT so as to reduce management overhead and to extend existing, limited IT
infrastructures, but even more importantly, they reduce the entrance barrier for new service
providers to offer their respective capabilities to a wide market with a minimum of entry costs and
infrastructure requirements – in fact, the special capabilities of cloud infrastructures allow providers
to experiment with novel service types whilst reducing the risk of wasting resources.
Cloud systems are not to be misunderstood as just another form of resource provisioning
infrastructure and in fact, as this report shows, multiple opportunities arise from the principles for
cloud infrastructures that will enable further types of applications, reduced development and
provisioning time of different  services. Cloud computing has particular characteristics that
distinguish it from classical resource and service provisioning environments:
(*) it is (more-or-less) infinitely scalable; (*) it provides one or more of an infrastructure for
platforms, a platform for applications or applications (via services) themselves; (3) thus clouds can
be used for every purpose from disaster recovery/business continuity through to a fully outsourced
ICT service for an organisation; (*) clouds shift the costs for a business opportunity from CAPEX to
OPEX which allows finer control of expenditure and avoids costly asset acquisition and maintenance
reducing the entry threshold barrier; (*) currently the major cloud providers had already invested in
large scale infrastructure and now offer a cloud service to exploit it; (*) as a consequence the cloud
offerings are heterogeneous and without agreed interfaces; (*) cloud providers essentially provide
datacentres for outsourcing; (*) there are concerns over security if a business places its valuable
knowledge, information and data on an external service; (*) there are concerns over availability and
business continuity  – with some recent examples of failures; (*) there are concerns over data
shipping over anticipated broadband speeds.
The concept of cloud computing is linked intimately with those of IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service);
PaaS (Platform as a Service), SaaS (Software as a Service) and collectively *aaS (Everything as a
Service) all of which imply a service-oriented architecture.

Open Res earch Issues
CLOUD TECHNOLOGIES AND MODELS HAVE NOT YET REACHED THEIR FULL POTENTIAL AND MANY OF THE CAPA BILITIES
ASSOCIATED WITH CLOUDS ARE NOT YET DEVELO PED AND RESEARCHED  TO A DEGREE THAT ALLOWS THEIR EXPLOITATION
TO THE FULL DEGREE, RESPECTIVELY MEETING ALL REQUIREMENTS UNDER ALL POTENTIAL CIRCUMSTANCES OF USAGE.
Many aspects are still in an experimental stage where the long-term impact on provisioning and
usage is as yet unknown. Furthermore, plenty of as yet unforeseen challenges arise from exploiting
the cloud capabilities to their full potential, involving in particular aspects deriving from the large
degree of scalability and heterogeneity of the underlying resources. We can thereby distinguish
between  technological gaps on the one hand, that need to be closed in order to realize cloud
infrastructures that fulfil the specific cloud characteristics and non-technological issues on the other
hand that in particular reduce uptake and viability of cloud systems:

To the technological aspects belong in particular issues related to (1) scale and elastic scalability,
which is not only currently restricted to horizontal scale out, but also inefficient as it tends to
resource over usage due to limited scale down capabilities and full replication of instances rather
than only of essential segments. (*) Trust, security and privacy always pose issues in any internet
provided service, but due to the specific nature of clouds, additional aspects related e.g. to multitenancy arise and control over data location etc. arise. What is more, clouds simplify malicious use
of resources, e.g. for hacking purposes, but also for sensitive calculations (such as weapon design)
etc. (*) Handling data in clouds is still complicated - in particular as data size and diversity grows,
pure replication is no viable approach, leading to consistency and efficiency issues. Also, the lacking
control over data location and missing provenance poses security and legalistic issues. (*)
Programming models are currently not aligned to highly scalable applications and thus do not
exploit the capabilities of clouds, whilst they should also simplify development. Along the same line,
developers, providers and users should be able to control and restrict distribution and scaling
behaviour. This relates to (5) systems development and management which is currently still
executed mostly manually, thus contributing to substantial efficiency and bottleneck issues.
On the other hand,  non-technological issues play a major role in realizing these technological
aspects and in ensuring viability of the infrastructures in the first instance. To these belong in
particular (*) economic aspects which cover knowledge about when, why, how to use which cloud
system how this impacts on the original infrastructure (provider) –long-term experience is lacking in
all these areas; and (*) legalistic issues which come as a consequence from the dynamic (location)
handling of the clouds, their scalability and the partially unclear legislative issues in the internet.
This covers in particular issues related to intellectual property rights and data protection. In
addition, (*) aspects related to green IT need to be elaborated further, as the cloud offers principally
“green capabilities” by reducing unnecessary.