The Cloud Challenges for Enterprise Architects

Abstract

Having understood the significant impact that cloud computing is having on the business sector, the enterprises and business houses are beginning to adopt the cloud paradigm. The business and technical advantages offered by the cloud provision are simply enormous, and so, its adoption and adaption are gaining unprecedented attention and acceleration. Market analysts and researchers have also come out with astronomical figures in order to indicate and insist on the exploding cloud market. Enterprises are formulating schemes and roadmaps for migration to the cloud environment. With the powerful emergence of cloud Computing, enterprises’ thinking and planning have also drastically changed. The noteworthy impacts and insights of the cloud idea are being well articulated by cloud infrastructure, platform, software, and service providers. Enterprise architects, in charge of drawing and deciding about open and extensible Enterprise Architectures (EAs), need to relook their current architectures and to ponder about the viable means and mechanisms in order to deftly incorporate the emerging and evolving cloud aspects into their architectures. In this chapter, we have discussed this subject area wherein the architects need to focus more deeply and diligently in order to suggest cloud-inspired enterprise architectures to their executive management. There are also numerous cloud-induced challenges and constraints on EA. These are also described in detail to enable architects to tread carefully in their mission. This chapter is a definite eye-opener as far as clearly describing the cloud insights and implications on the hot domain of EA.