Initial thoughts on business-driven IT management challenges in Cloud computing providers

Nowadays Cloud computing is recognized as the most emerging computing paradigm. Because of its promising benefits, every day more and more enterprises are relying on Cloud systems. Furthermore, new Cloud business models are appearing, most of them within the SaaS marketplace, which fully depend on PaaS and IaaS providers. In any case, the expectation from businesses that IT (Cloud) services and infrastructures should bring them closer to the achievement of their Business-Level Objectives (BLOs) is spreading. Due to this fact, the presence in Cloud providers of a self-management of Cloud services and infrastructures driven by business-level aspects is mandatory. In this direction, the Business-Driven IT Management (BDIM) discipline has been evolving as the most promising way in the sense of aligning IT (low-level) management decisions with business-level objectives coming from providers themselves, as well as from their users. In this paper, we expose several BDIM challenges on the Cloud computing paradigm. Consequently, we outline key issues for the inclusion of BDIM-related features into the core operation of Cloud providers.