Advanced It Outsourcing

Business process outsourcing (BPO) is a more comprehensive definition of the current situation within the outsourcing domain. BPO has become increasingly interesting as more and more business processes are commoditized and thus easier to be hosted by an external party. Cloud Computing has all the attributes and potential to support a global BPO environment. These attribute are: virtualization, service oriented architecture (SOA), utility based pricing and grid computing.

Cloud Computing involves the movement of IT services – application, infrastructure and platform – onto the Internet and deployment models. Because of the high availability, high bandwidth and the increased use of the Internet it has become easier to access a variety of services, traditionally originating from within a company? s data center. The concept of Cloud Computing is based on a collection of many old and few new concepts in several research fields like Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), distributed and grid computing as well as virtualization .

Service oriented Architecture 2. 2 Distributed and Grid Computing 2. 3 Virtualization 2. 4 Utility Computing 2. 1 Service-oriented Architecture Service-oriented Architecture refers to a modular design principle in Software architecture. Service-orientation aims at separating individual functions into distinct units or “services”, that could be accessed, e. g. via a network, by developers to integrate them in a reusable manner in their applications. SOA is an architecture model,not a technology itself.

SOA is an architectural concept that aims to achieve loose coupling between service requester and service provider, by means of well-defined technology-agnostic contracts supporting interoperability of services independent of operating systems, programming languages or any other technology specifics that underlie applications, supporting the implementation and delivery of services

A recent phenomenon in the domain of outsourcing is called Cloud Computing. Clouds are a large pool of easily usable and accessible virtualized resources (such as hardware, development platforms and/or services). These resources can be dynamically re-configured to adjust to a variable load (scale), allowing also for an optimum resource utilization. This pool of resources is typically exploited by a pay-per-use model in which guarantees are offered by the Infrastructure Provider by means of customized SLAs” (Vaquero, 2009).

This means actually that more and more IT services – applications and technology – are outsourced to external vendors over the Web, which eventually will lead to a change in the traditional business model – where IT is in-house organized to a virtual enterprise. This virtual enterprise, based on mainly Cloud services, could be the future perspective. Meanwhile organizations are looking into business process outsourcing (BPO), which involves the delegation of an entire business process to a third party rovider, including its supporting services There are generally three types of IT services which an organization can send into a cloud environment, namely: PaaS (platform as a service), SaaS (software as a service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)

This research will address the most significant differences between them and provide the basic architecture and layers of the Cloud Computing modelA Cloud is a type of parallel and distributed system consisting of a collection of interconnected and virtualized computers that are dynamically provisioned and presented as one or more Unified Computing resources based on service-level agreement established through negotiation between the service provider and consumers. Cloud Computing refers to both the applications delivered as services.

Distributed and Grid Computing Distributed computing is a technique where computing tasks are processed by a collection of networked computers and therefore can be seen a cluster of computers Grid computing creates a fast virtual computer from a network of computers by using their idle cycles. Even though grid computing is an important successor to distributed computing, the computing environments are essentially different.

For distributed computing, resources are homogeneous and are reserved, leading to guaranteed processing capacity. On the other hand, grid environments are 1 www. ijctonline. com ISSN: 2277–3061 (online) International Journal of Computers & Technology Volume 2 No. 2 April 2012 highly unpredictable. The computers are heterogeneous, their capacities are typically unknown and changing over time, and they may connect and disconnect from the grid at any time 4. 3 Software as a service (SAAS) 4. 4 Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) 4. 1 Infrastructure as a service Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is the delivery of hardware (server, storage and network), and associated software (operating systems virtualization technology, file system), as a service.

Through virtualization, infrastructure providers are able to split, assign and dynamically resize these resources to build ad-hoc systems as demanded by customers . The IaaS provider does very little management other than keep the data center operational. The users must deploy and manage the software themselves. The main difference is that data is not stored on the servers which an organization owns by itself, but stored on servers in datacenters of third party service providers. 2. 3 Virtual Organization A virtual organization (VO) is a dynamic group of individuals, groups, or organizations who define the conditions and rules for sharing resources. The concept of the VO is the key to grid computing.

All VOs share some characteristics and issues, including common concerns and requirements that may vary in size, scope, duration, sociology, and structure. The members of any VO negotiate the sharing of resources based upon the rules and conditions defined by the VO, and the members then share the resources in the VOs constructed resource pool. The concept of a VO is quite flexible in practice. 2. 4 Utility Computing Utility computing proposes to allow clients to buy computing capacity as they do electricity – just by plugging in or out. For users of this utility computing principle, the cost is variable and based on the actual capacity they require, rather than a fixed cost for a capacity they only use during peak periods.

Users can get the capacity they need whenever they need it, without expending resources and effort to frequently monitor and upgrade capacity. 4. 2 Platform as a Service (PAAS) Platforms are an abstraction layer between the software applications (SaaS) and the virtualized infrastructure (IaaS). In a Cloud platform arrangement the provider operates the whole computing platform or operating system for the customer which is accessed over the Web. This model makes all of the facilities and services required to support the complete life cycle of building and delivering applications entirely available as an integrated suite from the internet. Therefore platform as a service means that Cloud providers supply the software platform where systems run on.

Developers can write their applications according to the specifications of a particular platform without needing to worry about the underlying hardware infrastructure (IaaS). Developers upload their application code to a platform, which then typically manages the automatic up scaling when the usage of the application Grows.