Technical Forces Driving the Adoption of Cloud Computing
This chapter provides force field analyses for adopting two types of cloud providers: software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS). Towards the end of the chapter, the analyses will be combined with the analysis for service-oriented architectures (SOAs). I will show that using cloud computing generally increases the number of technical driving forces for adopting an SOA. Cloud computing also increases the strength of some of the existing technical driving forces for adopting an SOA.
Adopting Software as a Service (SaaS)
There have been many examples of SaaS cloud providers1 in this book. The audio-video (AV) example at the beginning of Chapter 4 uses multiple SaaS cloud providers. The story of C. R.’s trip mentions the customer relationship management (CRM) service that resides in the public cloud.
Figure 7.1 illustrates the driving and restraining forces for adopting SaaS. For this analysis, the forces affecting the adoption of an SOA are not included. This analysis looks at only SaaS. Including SaaS in an SOA will be analyzed later in this chapter.
Figure 7.1 Force field analysis for adopting SaaS.
Some of the forces affecting the adoption of SaaS are similar to adopting any software package. These appear in the upper right in Figure 7.1. There are restraining forces such as the service might not do everything that is needed and you may feel uncomfortable depending on a particular service. It would be reasonable to be concerned whether the service provider will keep up with new features or capabilities needed for effective use of a CRM service, for example. Also, conversion to a new system, whether in the cloud or not, can be a restraining force.
Other restraining forces are shaded in gray in Figure 7.1 to indicate they diminish with time. The first one is security. Security is often one of the biggest concerns when considering a move to a cloud provider. If you look to the left side, you will see security is a driving force as well. The reality is that major cloud providers might be more secure than a data center run by your organization. Cloud providers can hire the best security people because security is so important and the security provided is usually cutting edge. Cloud providers certainly can be targets for security attacks, but all this really does keep the security as high as possible. Since the data centers for major cloud providers are so big, they can keep equipment and software up to date because of economies of scale. Availability or uptime of a service and the Internet is similar to security. This appears on both sides in Figure 7.1. Just like security, cloud providers have the equipment and expertise to maximize availability and Internet availability will continue to improve. Both security and availability restraining forces will diminish over time, effectively increasing security and availability as driving forces for the adoption of SaaS like a CRM service.
Mergers and acquisitions might be a restraining force if the organizations use differing services or a system for something like CRM. On the other hand, the organizations might use the same service. Another option is that some industries may quickly move to a common semantic vocabulary, making a merger or acquisition less of a restraining force. In fact, Figure 7.1 shows related diminishing restraining forces, such as different semantics in data sources, semantic translation, and standards are still evolving. These are all related to standards.
Mergers and acquisitions along with a standard semantic vocabulary are shown as dashed lines at the lower left in Figure 7.1. This indicates that they might not apply to all organizations or industries. Similarly, Internet speed as a restraining force is shown with a dashed line because speed concerns will not be an issue for all organizations.
The remaining forces are driving forces. Some are the same as in earlier analyses. These are reduced development time, reduced maintenance, and reduced brittleness using tags or name/value pairs. Also, major SaaS cloud providers for such services as CRM offer training and tools if needed.
A new driving force is the lower initial investment in software and hardware since SaaS does not require the same upfront investment as a data center. With SaaS such costs are paid for on an incremental basis as an ongoing cost (another driving force). Also, services with an SaaS cloud provider usually have application programming interfaces (APIs) as well as applications. Both make it easier for exchanging data. The applications and APIs mean that data from the service can be accessed/updated from a mobile device as well as systems running in your data center.
Adopting Platform as a Service (PaaS)
At one point, C. R.’s organization decided to store its enterprise data in the cloud instead of in a data warehouse. The organization built the new data store using a PaaS provider. Storing data in the cloud accommodated storage needs changing over time as well as changing use/analysis of the data over time. Cloud computing provides such elasticity. This way, C. R.’s organization only pays for what it uses. With cloud computing, it is not necessary for C. R.’s organization to invest in the hardware and software needed to handle peak use.
Let’s assume a database management system was used in the cloud and that C. R.’s organization wrote custom software around the database management system. Also assume the PaaS provider has business intelligence (BI)/analytics software that works with the database management system.
Like many organizations, C. R.’s organization saw remarkable growth in the amount of data it maintains. To handle that amount of data, it chose a big data solution offered by a PaaS provider. Big data is a somewhat fuzzy term that refers to large and complicated data sets that may not be easily managed by traditional database management systems. A big data solution offered by a PaaS provider might be a NoSQL2 database management system. There are a variety of NoSQL database management systems on the market. Most are designed to work with big data.
Figure 7.2 shows the analysis for adopting a PaaS for implementing a big data storage solution in the cloud. Many of the same forces shown in Figure 6.3 for an enterprise data warehouse also apply here. These are the restraining forces of development costs: deciding what data to store, possible delays in getting data to the data store, issues related to the redundancy of data that is stored in multiple locations, and possible data quality issues for the data being stored. The driving forces include easier access to enterprise-wide data, reduced maintenance costs, reduced brittleness using tags or name/value pairs, minimal effect on operational systems, and the use of BI/analytics.
Figure 7.2 Force field analysis for adopting PaaS.
The discussion of security and availability (uptime) of the service/Internet discussed in earlier for the adoption of an SaaS also applies here. The remaining diminishing forces were discussed on page 59 for adopting an enterprise data warehouse or in the discussion for adopting SaaS earlier in this chapter.
Just as in adopting a SaaS, there are driving forces of lower initial investment in software and hardware and ongoing cost on an incremental basis. The PaaS cloud provider manages the hardware and provides the software.
Adopting Service-Oriented Architecture with Cloud Computing
This section discusses SOA with cloud computing using the SaaS and PaaS examples. Figure 7.3 shows the cloud computing providers for the CRM service and the big data store. The CRM service is from a public SaaS cloud provider. The big data store along with the BI/analytics uses a virtual private PaaS cloud provider. The remaining internal systems are the same ones as were shown in Figure 6.7.
Figure 7.3 Internal systems with cloud computing for a big data store and a CRM service.
The PaaS includes tools to help develop, manage, and analyze the data in big data stores. It provides an enterprise service bus (ESB) that is optimized for the big data store and the BI/analytics software.
The Internet is represented by the horizontal shaded area. Web services are shown as a black line within the shaded area. This represents that Web services protocols (SOAP, REST, JSON, etc.) are a subset of the protocols that can be used on the Internet.
Note the adapters aligned with the big data, BI/analytics, and the CRM in the cloud. They are needed because those services use a somewhat different semantic vocabulary than the one used by C. R.’s organization.
Figure 7.4 shows the technical driving and restraining forces for adopting an SOA with cloud computing. This basically adds forces related to cloud computing to Figure 6.9, which showed the driving and restraining forces for adopting an SOA. Figure 7.4 combines forces in Figure 6.9 with the forces related to adopting an SaaS CRM service (see Figure 7.1) and PaaS to store big data and provide BI/analytics (see Figure 7.2).
Figure 7.4 Force field analysis of technical issues related to adopting an SOA with cloud computing.
In this analysis, the enterprise data warehouse was replaced with a big data store. So, the restraining forces for adopting an enterprise data warehouse (see Figure 6.3) have been reworded for storing big data (see Figure 7.2): deciding what data to store and delays in getting data to the data store. Two business issues have been added: dependence on cloud-based services and conversions to use cloud-based services. A legal issue was added concerning contractual issues with the cloud provider.3 There is a new possible design restraint of Internet speed.
Security and availability (uptime) are both diminishing restraining forces and driving forces, as described for both SaaS and PaaS earlier in this chapter. In addition to security and availability (uptime), other new driving forces related to cloud computing are lower initial investment in software and hardware, ongoing cost on an incremental basis, and the possibility of using a standard semantic vocabulary.
Some of the driving forces related to SOAs are likely made stronger with cloud computing; they are reduced development time, reduced maintenance costs, availability of external services, and the availability of applications and APIs for easier exchange of data.
Over time, the remaining restraining forces will be typical business, legal, and design issues. Adding cloud computing generally increases the number of technical driving forces for adopting a service-oriented architecture. Cloud computing also increases the strength of some of the existing technical driving forces for adopting an SOA.
Summary
This chapter used force field analysis to show how various forces drive or restrain the adoption of services from two representative SaaS and PaaS cloud providers. The SaaS cloud provider was a CRM service and the PaaS cloud provider had a platform supporting big data and BI/analytics. The major finding of this analysis is that using cloud computing generally increases the number of technical driving forces for adopting an SOA. Cloud computing also increases the strength of some of the existing technical driving forces for adopting an SOA.