Leveraging cloud computing architectures to enhance scalability and security in modern financial services and payment infrastructure

Distributed system architectures are becoming commonplace in modern enterprise IT infrastructures. The world-wide success of the Internet-scale services based on them has inspiredthe corporate IT industryto adopt similar architectures to maximise scalability, resilience, and fault-tolerance oftheirenterpriseapplicationportfolios.However,ithasalsosparkeda competition for the cloudthatisresponsivetotherapid growth of demand for online services and their desktop, web, and mobile applications. The present state of the cloud computing market is fragmented and suffers from manyflaws, some of which have become apparent onlyrecently. This fragmentation exposes cloud customers to fire hazards, vendor lock-in, andinstabilityof cloud offerings. Flaws affect cloud service availability, performance, compliance, and data governance, integrity, privacy, ownership, and security.Whilethese flaws have been acknowledged for some time, there isno clear vision of how the cloud computing market will mature nor an analytical frameworkto facilitate cloud choice and migration in a well-founded manner. In analogyto the warnings of the mayor in “The Dark Knight”, manyusers, such as organisationsthat provide critical services, probablycompromised and will remain compelled tocompromise on the proper availabilityvs. securityvs. expense tradeoffs of their cloud supplyoptions. A widelydiscussed solution to this problem is a cloud services bus:a multi-tier network that offers a well-founded and abstractinfrastructure-level interface to cloud customers and service providers. A recent industryproposal is hybrid cloud computing: combining the use of public clouds, whosesecurity, trustworthiness, compliance, and pricesfluctuaterapidly, withalocalprivatecloud for criticalprocesses. Cloudbusarchitectureswillbeoutlined comparingtheirtechnical merits andreadinessfor practice. Recentlyproposed cloud-businitiativespredatethepresentdiscussion. However,thispaper providesanoverviewthat isformulatedrigorously, offers strict definitionsofessential concepts, andanalysesinscope adebatedtopicin writtenliterature. Theapplication to on-demand cloud service provisioning and accounting is a mere example