Leveraging cloud computing architectures to enhance scalability and security in modern financial services and payment infrastructure

Abstract

Distributed system architectures are becoming commonplace in modern enterprise IT infrastructures. The world-wide success of the Internet-scale services based on them has inspired the corporate IT industry to adopt similar architectures to maximise scalability, resilience, and fault-tolerance of their enterprise application portfolios. However, it has also sparked a competition for the cloud that is responsive to the rapid growth of demand for online services and their desktop, web, and mobile applications. The present state of the cloud computing market is fragmented and suffers from many flaws, some of which have become apparent only recently. This fragmentation exposes cloud customers to fire hazards, vendor lock-in, and instability of cloud offerings. Flaws affect cloud service availability, performance, compliance, and data governance, integrity, privacy, ownership, and security.

While these flaws have been acknowledged for some time, there is no clear vision of how the cloud computing market will mature nor an analytical framework to facilitate cloud choice and migration in a well-founded manner. In analogy to the warnings of the mayor in “The Dark Knight”, many users, such as organisations that provide critical services, probably compromised and will remain compelled to compromise on the proper availability vs. security vs. expense tradeoffs of their cloud supply options. A widely discussed solution to this problem is a cloud services bus: a multi-tier network that offers a well-founded and abstract infrastructure-level interface to cloud customers and service providers. A recent industry proposal is hybrid cloud computing: combining the use of public clouds, whose security, trustworthiness, compliance, and prices fluctuate rapidly, with a local private cloud for critical processes. Cloud bus architectures will be outlined comparing their technical merits and readiness for practice. Recently proposed cloud-bus initiatives predate the present discussion. However, this paper provides an overview that is formulated rigorously, offers strict definitions of essential concepts, and analyses in scope a debated topic in written literature. The application to on-demand cloud service provisioning and accounting is a mere example.