The Convergence of Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Cloud Computing

Abstract

Information Technology (IT) has become the critical and crucial ­component for providing the long-standing aspirations of the business community, namely, agility, adaptability, and affordability. That is, the coupling between IT and business is getting stronger and more solid. The well-articulated vision of business and IT alignment is definitely bound to raise a storm of innovations and improvizations for establishing and sustaining people-centric, process-based, service-oriented, model-driven, and Cloud-enabled enterprises that are destined to be dynamic, on-demand, autonomic, and real-time in their outlooks, operations, and offerings. As IT and business are getting interlinked very tightly, all kinds of advancements and accomplishments in IT are being expediently and easily replicated in business operations for the much-needed business disruption, augmentation, and transformation. There are several enabling and empowering technologies, and techniques emerging and elegantly evolving in order to close the inhibiting gap between IT and business. Practitioners and academics proudly project that Cloud Computing is the interruptive, inspiring, and inventive paradigm to fulfill this long-standing mission. In this chapter, we have written about the Enterprise Architecture (EA) frameworks facilitating the development and sustenance of flexible and futuristic EA. Furthermore, the chapter also discusses how the Cloud provision meets and molds EA and how the convergence of Cloud Computing with EA is to bring big success stories for small-, medium-, and large-scale enterprises.