GovOps: The Missing Link for Governance in Software-Defined IoT Cloud Systems

Cloud computing and the IoT are converging ever stronger, thus enabling proliferation of diverse large-scale IoT cloud systems. Such novel IoT cloud systems offer numerous advantages for the variety of stakeholders. However, due to scale, complexity and inherent geographical distribution of IoT cloud systems, governing new IoT cloud resources and capabilities poses numerous challenges in practice. In this paper, we introduce GovOps – a novel approach and a conceptual model for cloud-based, dynamic governance of software-defined IoT cloud systems at runtime. By introducing a suitable GovOps reference model and a dedicated GovOps manager, it simplifies realizing governance processes and enables performing custom governance tasks more efficiently in practice. We illustrate the feasibility of our approach and its applicability to govern large-scale software-defined IoT cloud systems, using real-world case studies in the building automation and vehicle management domains.