Symptoms Automation Framework for Cloud Business Alignment: A Collaborative and Responsive Architecture for Knowledge Sharing

The emergence of Cloud computing, has exacerbated the alignment problems between Information Technology (IT) and business, and has introduced novel issues pertaining to the communication, understanding, and interactions between consumers and providers. Loss of control and ownership coupled with an ever increasing set of policies, regulations and directives, makes decision-making and response enactment particularly difficult. The Symptoms Automation Framework supports and promotes collaboration and automated responses to changing conditions. Further, it enables knowledge sharing and interoperation between different stakeholders in the Cloud domain. In this paper we present the problems SAF is trying to solve pertaining to Cloud business alignment, and discuss our experiences using and developing the framework and the use cases.