Connectivity as a service: Outsourcing enterprise connectivity over Cloud Computing environment

Abstract

Today, the emergence and booming of Cloud Computing brings unprecedented impact to traditional enterprise connectivity market at the same time of bringing huge impact to IT architecture and enterprise computing environment. The requirements of integrating numerous on premise application and off premise application or service, and the IT cost effect coming with Cloud Computing lead enterprise expediting the mindset changes from the on premise ESB architecture to Cloud Computing oriented enterprise computing, that is Connectivity as a Service (CaaS). We argue in this paper that the outsourcing enterprise connectivity over Cloud Computing environment to construct CaaS has been becoming an unavoidable tendency to be adopted by enterprise users. We firstly have an overview of history and current status of enterprise connectivity in the beginning of the paper and then highlight the problems to be tackled in this field currently, following which we present one CaaS reference model and the corresponding conceptual architecture. We then explore in more details on their characteristics in critical perspectives and finally solidify our vision by carrying out one case study on CaaS in actual usage. ©2011 IEEE.