The Scientific Community

Cloud Messaging – A Key to connect multiple Clouds, Social, Mobile

The Atos Scientific Community, in its recent research paper; Ascent Journey 2016, considers the challenge that an enterprise will have with business processes not confined to a single cloud but distributed across multiple clouds.

The topic of cloud is no longer a hype. Cloud solutions in a variety of forms are now well established and are growing rapidly. The benefits of well implemented cloud solutions are significant and are being proven in the IT service industry.

Going forward, in today’s dynamic business environment, processes in an enterprise will not be confined to single cloud but span across multiple clouds. We anticipate that with the rise of smart phones, tablets, social media and other intelligent devices that are now participating in the complete enterprise ecosystem, the interaction patterns between cloud components and consumers is becoming even more complex. Hence, organizations need to ensure that their processes are able to intelligently and efficiently interact with each other in order to guarantee optimum utilization.

I believe enterprises will face these challenges below:

1) A risk of process disaggregation as point solutions are implemented in the cloud to replace systems that were tightly integrated as part of an internal or fully outsourced IT landscape. As an example, moving e-mail services to the cloud may appear very cost effective, but in making the move, other business processes that relied on close e-mail system integration to work efficiently, may become broken. Of course the integration links can be rebuilt, but one of the major advantages of a cloud delivery model is flexibility and agility – building custom integration links between all cloud instances removes that flexibility and agility.

2) Cloud portability becomes increasingly important based on the fact that the potential number of entities participating in “The Cloud” will grow significantly, driven especially by the “internet of things”. This will in turn result in choices for customers to move business processes across clouds and/or orchestrate with other clouds without disrupting their businesses.

3) With multiple client devices like mobiles and tablets, and increasing use of social media, how do we guarantee that messages will get transmitted reliably to their destinations?

Therefore, there is a definite need of orchestration and messaging which can connect all social, cloud, location and mobile seamlessly to orchestrate the business processes and allow cloud portability by mirroring workloads across clouds, so that if one cloud fails the other cloud takes over the business process. Such integrated messaging will not be a “nice to have” requirement, but a “must have” necessity for effective and efficient future business process management with the highest levels of integrity, reliability and security.

The principle of a Cloud Messaging Platform resolves these issues, by maintaining layers of abstraction between the component parts of a cloud delivery eco-system whilst still allowing the different elements to interact through standards based messaging protocols.

Cloud messaging will also help to support hybrid environments involving legacy applications that are not suitable for porting to the cloud. Such legacy challenges are often seen as a major stumbling block for cloud strategies, but cloud messaging will allow integration links with legacy environments to be maintained without forfeiting the cost and flexibility of moving the rest of the IT landscape to the cloud.

From a market perspective , it is estimated that cloud orchestration services will eventually represent about 30% of the total cloud IT revenue, which in turn is predicted to be worth about $100 billion.