A virtual enterprise model for enabling cloud computing for SMMEs
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Date
2014
Authors
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Publisher
University of Zululand
Abstract
Information Technology (IT) is a major aspect of most businesses. It has proven to increase
productivity, reduce costs and improve a company's bottom line. This is also the case for
Small, Medium and Micro Enterprises (SMMEs), which are usually family-owned
businesses, and due to their nature they cannot afford to purchase ICT (Information and
Communication) infrastructure. It is therefore not economically viable for SMMEs to acquire
their own ICT infrastructure. However, they have the option of taking advantage of cloud
computing capabilities instead.
In cloud computing, dynamically scalable resources are provided as a virtualised
service. Cloud computing is patterned after a utility business model where you use only what
you require. The cloud is an evolving concept derived from a service-centric point of view.
All the resources and capabilities of a cloud are offered to users in the form of service that
can be accessed through the Internet. Users are billed on a pay-per-use basis or through
subscription. The cloud adopts virtualisation, a service-oriented architecture, infrastructure
scalability, the web and utility computing as the underlying concepts to provide on-demand
services.
This research work is an attempt to use the virtual enterprise (VE) concept to enable SMMEs
to respond quickly to market opportunities and customer demands. Cost is a key constraint
for African users of technology, thus our business model addresses such challenges. The
largest percentage of users of the proposed VE model use mobile devices, because its design
addressed challenges associated with generic cloud and mobile cloud. These are some of the
ways in which the design of the proposed VE model is atypical.
Our VE-enabled cloud enterprise architecture for SMMEs is evaluated against the Amazon
EC2 pricing model to prove that our pricing model is more suitable for SMMEs. This model
is based on the realisation that it is not economically viable for SMMEs to acquire their own
private cloud infrastructure or even subscribe to public cloud services as a single entity. The
pricing model obtained from our proposed business model shows the benefits that are derived
from using the VE cloud model over subscription to a public cloud as a single business
enterprise. The pricing structure of our VE cloud model is up to 17.82 times more economical
compared to the equivalent Amazon EC2 instance type pricing model. The results obtained
show the benefits that are derived by integrating the VE alliance concept with the cloud
computing concept. This is shown by evaluating our architecture through one of the open
access cloud platforms.
Description
Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science in the Faculty of Science and Agriculture at the University of Zululand, South Africa, 2014.
Keywords
Cloud computing