Towards a cloud oriented technological reference model of Bahrain

The Bahraini smart city should have a reference model that precisely aligns the cloud oriented capabilities of the operating applications and technological infrastructure, along with the relevant business actors and strategy in order to meet smart city requirements. Unfortunately, findings revealed limited rigorous reference architectural models to service smart city requirements. Much worse was that the remaining ones lacked coherency, practicality, quality, or even the cloud transformation complementarity. Filling in this gap, this paper presents a development endeavor of a Bahraini cloud oriented Smart City-Technological Reference Architectural Model (BCSC-TRAM), to effectively identify, locate, and enable the access of cloud based ICT portfolio for their public, semi-public, and private enterprises. In other words, the model helps in identifying the gaps and redundancies existing in the cloud ICT capabilities in Bahrain in one place and their sharing, reuse, and consolidation in the other place. The theoretical and practical background of BCSC-TRAM development and validation is based on the collaborative insights collected from the literature review, the enterprise architecture approach and the NIST reference model. The paper used multiple data collection sources including, literature review, interviews and content analysis for the Bahraini public, semi-public, and private enterprises. The model validation, however, is achieved through performing cross section mapping and alignment to the proclaimed standard NIST model.