End-user Architectural Models

This study approached the subject of cloud service models in Table (2.6) in the Literature Review chapter by highlighting different Smart Building management techniques and associated concerns. The discussion was briefly introduced in terms of previous

publications on technical descriptions, top providers examples, security concerns, and brief case studies for ICT-dependent environments. The following will further elaborate on cloud end-user architectural models in relation to the pros and cons of each, implementation and purchase methods, additional expenses, and management readiness.

The overall cloud-computing stack consists of three main interdependent layers (Figure 3.4). These include: the application, the development platform, and the heterogeneous infrastructure which forms a solid base for customizing all the above.

(Figure 3.4) Cloud-Computing three Interdependent Architectural Layers

Application

Platform

Infrastructure

Commercial Software Access

Information, Messaging, Connectivity, Integration, Services Access

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The main cloud service approach was divided respectively into Infrastructure as a Service IaaS, Platform as a Service PaaS, and Software as a Service SaaS. However, numerous separate models have also been introduced such as Database as a service (DaaS), Cluster as a Service (CaaS), Network as a Service (NaaS), and Policy Management as a Service (PMaaS). As previously established, the three main models represent the primary focus of this research in order to acquire a scalable, sustainable, and cost-efficient solution for Smart Building ICT management.

 Infrastructure as a Service IaaS

The IaaS model provides end-users with the backbone computing infrastructure that is essential for internal application hosting, operating systems, software component

management, and deployment. These resources include hardware machines, virtual PCs, or a combination of both. In addition, the IaaS scope covers on-demand processing units for specified capacity and networking bandwidth for switching, routing, and other data sharing functions, clusters, and physical storage (Brunette & Mogull, 2009). For example, Smart Buildings that represent health care facilities, airports, or shopping malls, are recommended by cloud engineers to adopt the IaaS solution given many up-front cost and technical abilities, which allow in-house IT administrators to select the appropriate number of virtual machines and install privately owned applications. Although controlling these tools is carried out to a limited extent by in-house personnel, only a minimum amount of administration is allowed in reference to the underlying cloud platform. This usually includes networking software units like deployed firewalls and other routing tools (Goscinski & Brock, 2010).

The Infrastructure as a Service model follows a raw delivery concept which is used in services from top providers such as Amazon’s EC2, and GoGrid. This is considered the lowest abstraction level in the cloud hierarchy structure. In addition, the virtualized

management of ICT components provides non-expert Smart Building managers with a high degree of implementation simplicity, as there is no need to perform full and complicated system installation procedures, which involve complex administrative decisions and in- house maintenance. Furthermore, the money spent on purchasing such systems is greatly reduced as computing resources are virtually rented, managed and supported according to

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actual needs (The Cloud Scaling Group, 2011). Charges are delivered either monthly, annually, or depending on actual service consumption, definition, and agreed terms of measurement.

It can be stated that the majority of today’s Smart Buildings require complex and costly ICT resources that burden the overall technology management process. While this is by default added to the entire building control framework, it includes systems such as HVAC, CCTVs, energy sensors, and various measuring devices regardless of the organizational nature and operational objectives. Therefore, the IaaS model is generally considered an efficient way to implement cloud-computing services. Yet, this is argued whilst

maintaining a certain level of in-house control over virtually utilized resources. This efficiency factor not only covers purchase expenses as the IaaS also alleviates additional management efforts along with energy consumed on cooling and other ICT associated tasks. In particular, several cloud providers like Commensus, offer a hybrid console

solution called vCloud, which enables IT managers to integrate existing systems with newly added virtual ones via an agile, user-friendly desktop interface (Commensus Website, 2013).

From a Smart Building perspective, it can be noted that the IaaS approach is the key

element behind ICT migration and efficient management, especially when end-users utilize a relatively large-scale portfolio. While good performance in terms of speed and

maintenance was acknowledged as a major aspect of IaaS, it was observed by various cloud users that incompatible availability and unstable performance lifecycle had occurred on frequent occasions from utilizing IaaS features. In addition, numerous studies have taken on performance benchmarking, challenges, and value analysis in relation to IaaS purchase and implementation. For example, some publications have highlighted several system

procurement aspects of the IaaS general performance concerning cloud middleware benchmarking and evaluation (Iosup, Prodan & Epema, 2012). Particularly, a non- functional analysis was carried out in accordance to multiple industry-based principles, which reflect essential decision-making considerations for Smart Building non-expert managers.

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IaaS challenges concerning benchmarking and performance standards can be identified in reference to Smart Buildings’ workload, system metrics, and management properties on various levels. These considerations include:

- Legal jurisdiction and level-of-trust issues regarding identifying shared stakeholders - Cloud resource infiltration between different rival organizations

- Insufficient governance

- Re-requisition of purchased features (Hay, Nance & Bishop, 2011).

Potential solutions were recommended by top cloud providers like Rackspace and Google to add data encryption, malware detection, and other vulnerability assessment tools. These were introduced through communication channels between end-users’ in-house ICT infrastructure and providers’ virtual machines. In particular, similar solutions were

highlighted for a set of interconnected and differently-located Smart Buildings where large volumes of data are shared, accessed, integrated, and altered on a daily basis.

Recommendations suggested that if Smart Buildings were to apply IaaS features, a major consideration must be established for specifying employees’ permissions to forbid access, manipulate user details, and setup new cloud accounts (McKendrick, 2012). These

situations were expected to occur due to fragile policy identification between cloud providers and consumers.

Nevertheless, given that IaaS resources are located at the bottom of all cloud service models (Figure 3.4), these features form a fundamental platform for both PaaS and SaaS multi-tenant services. Therefore, examples of IaaS users cover almost all types of industries in relation to size, workload, nature of business, and international branches. For example, relatively large Smart Buildings often tend to maintain as much on-premises control as possible over ICT infrastructures, while simultaneously lever from virtualized services that essentially eliminate ICT purchase costs and personnel staffing.

It can be concluded that decision-makers only employ the IaaS model when the intention is to acquire a virtual, billing-oriented and as-needed infrastructure. While this covers

networking, computational, and storage components, it consequently allows managers to integrate with existing applications and legacy platforms. It must be noted that IaaS users

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are typically divided into Private and Public service requesters, as will be elaborated next in the deployment sub-section. Overall, gaining more administrative and technical control over both cloud-based and in-house ICT components will result in a wider range of flexibility within Smart Building ICT environments. These are usually associated to database engines, networked operating systems (NOS), and VMs (Massimo, 2010). While this was observed to increase management overheads, a higher transparent transformation is attained from adopting the IaaS model, which was agreed as cost-efficient in sizable

organizations.

 Platform as a Service PaaS

The PaaS model comes directly above the IaaS layer. While it includes both technical aspects from the latter, the main goal from PaaS is to virtually provide a larger scope of ICT features, which is essentially utilized as a development environment for specialized software. In particular, the PaaS model is designed for end-users to develop, compile, and run applications via IaaS virtual machines. Moreover, in reference to potential PaaS users from Smart Buildings, this group would involve to a considerable degree specialized ICT and business organizations requirements.

These were observed to cover ecommerce database providers and software development companies who already possess a high knowledge of code and programming languages, yet, neither have the ability nor the proper budget to purchase these development platforms and install them in-house. On the other hand, other non-technical firms such as business knowledge experts, project management, eStrategy and eMarketing providers who also seek to develop consumer-created applications, are included in the PaaS scope of potential users. These however do not necessarily acquire coding expertise as well as other technical deployment aspects. In this account, IaaS services have the ability to provide a suitable environment for developing software via higher levels of abstraction while following pure business logics (Subramanian, 2010).

One of the main challenges in adopting PaaS services is information integrity and encryption. Each data record is recommended to undergo repeated encryptions through digital signature functions before being sent to the cloud provider. This would largely result

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in CPU bottle-neck and speed reduction in relation to in-house servers and networking infrastructure. Nevertheless, this can be solved by applying certain sorting functions that encrypt important pieces of data such as users’ critical information, healthcare records, and banking details (McKendrick, 2012).

The decision-making task of assessing whether to employ virtual platform services over the cloud, or not, is usually performed by ICT managers in the Smart Building, and not by non- expert managers alone. However, decision-support systems can to some extent empower non-experts to measure the degree of cost and power efficiency obtained from applying PaaS, which is one of the goals of SBCE as will be discussed in Chapter 6.

It must be noted that PaaS features only ensure a minimum amount of underlying flexibility in addition to medium management savings. However, end-users are enabled with restricted control abilities, which merely cover in-house developed applications and associated data (Kuyoro, Ibikunle & Awodele, 2011). Accordingly, potential options for the PaaS

migration process can be summed up through the following scenarios:

 Migrating to the cloud: to ensure compatibilities with in-house development platforms

 Migrating in the cloud: for additional hosting procedures or ad-hoc deployments within the PaaS infrastructure

 Migrating from the cloud: for system backtracking for internal software deployment, which is often subsequent to cloud-based development  Migrating out of the cloud: such as relying on in-house development

platforms after unsuccessful PaaS migration

PaaS providers range from medium-sized software companies which operate on pure coding and programming environments, to well-known ICT giants such as Microsoft Azure, VMforce and Google App-Engine. This model was argued by these providers as the future of information systems (Hölzle, 2014). Nevertheless, protecting the Smart Building private information in a way that erases all potential audit trails, protects API keys, and maintains both confidentiality and integrity throughout various development processes, is still an ongoing research matter.

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Platform cloud services are mostly used by companies that develop ICT software which require unstable ICT requirements in terms of the programming platforms, bandwidth capacity, and processing power. These organizations also adopt PaaS solutions to ensure that their business objectives are met in terms of cutting down ICT costs, reducing management processes, and reducing ICT-related power consumption.

PaaS cloud providers allow users to control development platforms on a middleware level. This is accomplished through a higher abstraction level, which essentially distinguishes PaaS from IaaS services. In addition, it determines the general performance employed in compiling the programming code in terms of QoS levels, runtime, and APIs’ scalability agreements between PaaS users and providers (Rymer, 2010). Similarly, this was tested to reduce costs, time spent, and risks in relation to frequent upgrade purchase and availability check-ups, while subsequently concentrating internal efforts on concrete application development. Although the PaaS approach does not occupy a major part of this research, several principles will be examined in the next chapter across different academic interviews and other data collection.

 Software as a Service SaaS

The Software as a Service model is located at the top of the cloud hierarchy layers. In principle, end-users rent out access to certain cloud-hosted applications according to:

- On-demand availability periods, - Number of users,

- QoS attributes,

- Mobile vs. fixed profiling, - Other administrative aspects.

In order to ensure cost-efficiency and long-term management simplicity, these points must be clearly defined by both Smart Building managers on one hand and cloud providers on the other. While the SaaS model is entirely controlled by the cloud provider, service

consumers do not possess any management flexibility with built-in, virtually managed, and fully integrated cloud applications. Nevertheless, only limited abilities in terms of basic configuration manipulation is within reach by cloud end-users.

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SaaS solutions such as Google Apps, DropBox, Yahoo mails, and Sales-Force, are mainly utilized by business companies for optimization purposes in relation to Enterprise resource planning (ERP), Customer relationship management (CRM), and Stock management. This approach is considered the most common cloud solution in terms of simplicity, speed of implementation, usage regulations, capacity alteration, upfront expenses, upgrades and maintenance. In addition, SaaS features offer a key sustainable factor as it limits users’ access to cloud applications to a simple interface of thin-client middleware. Whereas these range from either internet browsers or other remote desktop tools, overall management overheads and power consumption averages are significantly decreased in this context.

In relation to cloud utilization decision-making, the following figure was assembled to demonstrate different levels of control that end-users can acquire across the previous three cloud service models. This is illustrated in accordance with key cloud components, which are either managed by the service provider or requester (Figure 3.5). The diagram shows the separation of responsibilities, security appropriate methods and other outsourcing readiness aspects which can vary depending on various ICT objectives of different Smart Buildings.

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(Figure 3.5) ICT Components: Division of Management Responsibilities between on-premises (Smart Buildings) vs. cloud providers. Reconstructed from: (Bort, 2013).

 Conclusion

According to the Cloud Security Alliance, IaaS was considered the core platform of all cloud-computing services (Brunette & Mogull, 2009). Each cloud provider was following both a unique in-house technical agenda and a layering methodology when it comes to the actual delivery and definition of cloud service models. This has resulted in issues regarding standardizing the cloud as highlighted earlier in the Literature Review chapter. Therefore, non-expert managers have a critical quantifying task of validating the entire scope of available selections, alternative options, potential risks accompanied with each, and growth/decline lifecycle scenarios.

Application Data Runtime Middleware O/S Virtualization Servers Storage Networking Application Data Runtime Middleware O/S Virtualization Servers Storage Networking Application Data Runtime Middleware O/S Virtualization Servers Storage Networking Application Data Runtime Middleware O/S Virtualization Servers Storage Networking

SaaS PaaS IaaS

End-User Managed Provider Managed

High Reliability & Security (On Premises) Password Issues Encryption Issues Rough/Unwarranted

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Certain cloud providers have offered few other architectural forms regarding certain bespoke user objectives such as Data as a Service (DaaS), Identity and Police Management as a Service (IPMaaS), and Network as a Service (NaaS). It can be concluded from

previous publications that until now Smart Building ICT management have not had a consensus on identifying the most favourable cloud service model. This is mainly because of the dissimilar operational types of portfolios and existing contracts with many external ICT providers.

The previous three core types of cloud service models were analysed according to the definition by The US National Institute of Standards and Technology ‘NIST’. Further, the technical extent of in-house Smart Building participation in managing cloud-based resources internally, can be concluded as the key factor towards minimizing long-term expenditure, energy consumption, improving user experience (UX), and service- friendliness (Bates, 2010). In addition, multiple compliance and regulation issues form another key consideration for Smart Building non-expert managers to ensure effective cloud purchase. While several features might appear attractive and cost-efficient at first sight, the built-in operational nature of the highlighted Smart Building could prove

otherwise after deployment. This can be in response to rooted government considerations, real-life correspondence with end-users’ needs, ICT laws’ concurrence, and compatibility with conventional methods of computing and networking systems.