A universal unit for measuring clouds

Cloud service providers (CSPs) offer a utility computing service model in which users are expected to only pay for the resources that they use. However, a lack of common standards used by different cloud providers and the complexity of cloud resource distribution and orchestration often lead to an excess in resource pool allocation and overall inefficiencies. This complexity percolates throughout the cloud service industry and is the real hindrance to the use of the utility service model especially in healthcare organizations, which are expected to provide new and improved patient care capabilities using cloud resources. In this paper, a single cloud unit for metering all resources relating to the delivery of cloud computing is developed and implemented. This unit represents the summation of weighted components (network, compute, storage, power, facilities, etc.) used in the delivery of a cloud service. Performance results observed in the actual implementation of an enterprise cloud showed that the proposed unit provides an easy to use tool for comparing CSP services, and can lead to increased efficiency and manageability of resource usage in an enterprise.