Management of Cloud Infastructures: Policy-Based Revenue Optimization

Competition on global markets forces many enterprises to make use of new applications, reduce process times and at the same time cut the costs of their IT-infrastructure. To achieve this, it is necessary to maintain a high degree of flexibility with respect to the IT-infrastructure. Facing this challenge the idea of Cloud computing has been gaining interest lately. Cloud services can be accessed on demand without knowledge of the underlying infrastructure and have already succeeded in helping companies deploy products faster. Using Cloud services the New York Times managed to convert scanned images containing 11 million articles into PDF within 24 hours at a cost of merely 240 US-$. However Cloud providers will only offer their services, if they can realize sufficient benefit. To achieve this, the efficiency of Cloud infrastructure management must be increased. To this end we propose the use of concepts from revenue management and further enhancements.