Implications of Integration and Interoperability for Enterprise Cloud-Based Applications

Abstract

Abstract. Enterprise's adoption of cloud-based solutions is often hindered by problems associated with the integration of the cloud environment with onpremise systems. Currently, each cloud provider creates its proprietary application programing interfaces (APIs), which will complicate integration efforts for companies as they struggle to understand and manage these unique application interfaces in an interoperable way. This paper aims to address this challenge by providing recommendations to enterprises. The presented work is based on a quantitative study of 114 companies, which discuss current issues and future trends of integration and interoperability requirements for enterprise cloud application adoption and migration. The outcome of the discussion provides a guideline applicable to support decision makers, software architects and developers when considering to design and develop interoperable applications in order to avoid lock-in and integrate seamlessly into other cloud and on-premise systems.

Taxonomy of Cloud Lock-in Challenges

“…Prior to presenting the proposed taxonomy, it is worthy to mention that the identification of elements and components of the categorization used is based on the critical review of key literatures in [40][41][42][43][44][45], the preceding section and subsequent sections. This critical review followed the systematic approach proposed by [52].…”

“…As cloud computing adoption rate soars across enterprises (small or large), the risks of vendor lock-in is prevalent. Limited studies exist, except for [40][41][42][43][44], to analyze and highlight the complexity of vendor lock-in problem in the cloud environment. Therefore, when selecting SaaS offerings from cloud vendors, organizations need to consider and balance service criticality against the significance of avoiding potential risks of vendor lock-in.…”

“…However, if the provider does not offer readymade data "export" functionality, the enterprise will need to develop a program to extract their data and write it to a file ready for import to another vendor. It should be noted that database schemas, data formats, and application programming interfaces (APIs) are valuable in providing the function of interoperability of communication and processing within the SaaS cloud [41,44]. However, the closed proprietarily coding of these key components across SaaS vendor offerings results in the need for resource (i.e., human effort, time, and cost) to be focused into developing a solution to break free from having the enterprise data locked into SaaS offerings (e.g., data models, platforms, and programming languages).…”

A comprehensive meta-analysis of cryptographic security mechanisms for cloud computing

“…Therefore, minimizing the trust placed on the CSPs is one of the most desired requirements (Kandukuri et al 2009;Aceto et al 2013;ES 2014;Opara-Martins et al 2015). Minimizing required trust can be achieved with advanced cryptographic techniques such as homomorphic encryption, secret sharing and threshold cryptosystems (in order to distribute the trust), bilinear pairing, secure multiparty computation and fully homomorphic encryption (Schneier 2009;Pinkas et al 2009;Huang et al 2011a;Guellier 2014;Coron et al 2014;Smart and Vercauteren 2014;Demmler et al 2015;Wang et al 2015a;Halevi and Shoup 2015a).…”

“…Virtual machines (VM) are the key aspects of cloud computing where different users (called tenants) access the same physical hardware. However, a corrupted hypervisor can damage all systems that it hosts (Kandukuri et al 2009;Ideler 2012;DNSP 2014;ES 2014;Opara-Martins et al 2015;Klemperer 2015;AlBelooshi et al 2015;Roy et al 2015). One of the best proposed solutions is to utilize Trusted Platform Modules (TPM) which can provide hardware-based verification of hypervisor and VM integrity in order to guarantee network separation and security.…”