Cloud computing: The next revolution in information technology

Computing is being transformed to a model consisting of services that are commoditised and delivered in a manner similar to utilities such as water, electricity, gas, and telephony. In such a model, users access services based on their requirements without regard to where the services are hosted. Several computing paradigms have promised to deliver this utility computing vision and they include Grid computing, P2P computing, and more recently Cloud computing. The latter term denotes the infrastructure as a Cloud in which businesses and users are able to access applications from anywhere in the world on demand. Cloud computing delivers infrastructure, platform, and software (application) as services, which are made available as subscription-based services in a pay-as-you-go model to consumers. These services in industry are respectively referred to as Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). To realize Cloud computing potential, vendors such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and IBM are starting to create and deploy Clouds in various locations around the world. In addition, companies with global operations require faster response time, and thus save time by distributing workload requests to multiple Clouds in various locations at the same time. This creates the need for establishing a computing atmosphere for dynamically interconnecting and provisioning Clouds from multiple domains within and across enterprises. There are many challenges involved in creating such Clouds and Cloud interconnections.