Service Migration in a Cloud Architecture

This paper examines service migration in a new computing paradigm, the cloud computing environment (CCE), by examining security and integration issues associated with service implementation. We postulate that a cloud architecture will evolve to be both more flexible and heterogeneous in resources because of the services complexity demanded by organizations. This introduces additional, but tractable, complications when considering the service migration concept within three support areas; acquisition, implementation, and security that present significant challenges to service migration in the cloud. From the consumer perspective, these support areas present the slowest and most costly components of the migration problem for small to medium size organizations. We hypothesize that several mechanisms including CCE platform standards and a computational virtual machine will need to be developed (or will emerge and achieve dominance in the cloud market domain) to facilitate service migration and the resolution of the issues identified.