Strategic Provision of Cloud Computing Services

Objective of Service Provisioning

The strategic objectives of provisioning cloud services have a paramount importance. We describe the major objectives as follows.

Fair Comparison

One of the objectives of service provisioning is the fair comparison among the available services or with the CSP. Generally, users compare different cloud offerings according to their priorities and along several dimensions to select whatever is appropriate to their needs. However, it is a difficult task to perform an unbiased comparison and evaluation of all services. Several challenges must be addressed to develop an evaluation model that precisely measures the service level of each cloud provider. This study aims to provide a comparable service analysis for the cloud user to choose among desired services.

Compliance

Service provisioning should comply with appropriate policies. The assurance of service compliance comes from the service providers. The CSP assures the customer of their compliance policies such as data protection, data confidentiality, and necessary data security by complying with the international compliance authority. NIST, ENISA, HIPAA, ISO 27001, and CSA are several compliance authorities who provide guidelines to establish the current cloud compliance security standards for the industry. In the Abbreviations Section, the details of the acronyms are presented.

Prediction

Prediction is important in cloud service provisioning. A service user should be ensured of the elasticity and scalability of the services, even during peak hours or when the user suddenly makes an unusually high demand on the resources. In this situation, one of the objectives of the service provisioning selection is that the request should be instantly fulfilled by the service provider. Therefore, the user should be assured of the available required resources on demand with the predictable elastic and scalable services.

Rank

Selecting the best and most appropriate service is a vital factor for the cloud service user. Selecting services depends on comparing and ranking them suitably. A reasonable and acceptable ranking system helps the cloud customer to make decisions about service selection. Therefore, the cloud service ranking system is an important aspect of a fair cloud service comparison and selection process. However, there is a lack of comparison of services across providers due to a lack of common comparable criteria or attributes.