Posted by Andrea Manieri

ICT services in the next few years will be even more based on the concept of service. Current hosting services will be reshaped as infrastructure as a service, software applications will be re-designed following the Software-as-a-Service concepts, Data and content Repositories will be accessible as a service. Though not yet well-defined, cloud computing Services are the most interesting perspective for future business, the right step to pave the way toward the knowledge society based on the so-called Future Internet.

An interesting debate is underway on what a cloud is or is not, and the relation between cloud infrastructures and grids, which in recent years have become the buzzword for IT in the future. Analysts, enterprises, and academics, all are attempting to define the concept of cloud Computing and cloud Computing Services. The Engineering Group sees the cloud as a way to deploy a Service-oriented Architectures. Exploiting virtualisation technologies, cloud Infrastructures should provide basic services to developers that can be put together to provide the requested Service-oriented architecture (SOA) at the right level of abstraction. Virtualisation technologies allow to abstract from hardware of different vendors, from different operating systems, from different development platforms and from different service development environments.

Each of (All) these level(s) of abstraction could be provided by a cloud Infrastructure, be it private, public or hybrid. Security and trust of a cloud, dependability of a cloud-based system, ease of use/deployment and discovery of software services in a cloud, single-sign-on mechanisms adapted to public or hybrid clouds, accounting and billing technologies specifically targeting the cloud model, quality assurance methods for applications running over a cloud, are examples of research challenges still facing ICT research players. On the positive (or negative) side of these issues, the popularity of cloud computing will become real business.

The Engineering Group is part of this evolutionary process, bringing the deep knowledge of the Italian and European IT markets, strong expertise in grid and service technologies and the capacity of its data centers. Engineering is heavily involved in NESSI, the European Technology Platform on Software and Services, it is contributing to the evolution of the European e-Infrastructures and is investigating in new techniques to ensure high-quality secure and dependable ICT services delivered by its own data centers.