Benefits and Challenges for BPM in the Cloud

Business processes are not only variable, they are dynamic as well. A key benefit of BPM is the ability to adjust processes accordingly in response to changing market requirements. In parallel to BPM, enterprise cloud computing technology has emerged to provide a more cost effective solution to businesses and services while making use of inexpensive computing solutions, which combines pervasive, internet, and virtualization technologies (). Despite the slow start the business benefits of cloud computing are as such that the transition of BPM to the cloud is now underway. Cloud services refer to the operation of a virtualized, automated, and service-oriented IT landscape that allows the flexible provision and usage-based invoicing of resources, services, and applications via a network or the Internet. The generic term “X-as-a-Service” summarized the business models delivering almost everything as a service. BPM in the cloud is often regarded as a SaaS application. More recently, BPM is being regarded as a PaaS as it facilitates the creation and deployment of applications, in this case business process solutions. The PaaS landscape is the least developed of the four cloud based software delivery models previously discussed. PaaS vendors, such as IBM, Oracle, Microsoft delivered an application platform with managed cloud infrastructure services however more recently the PaaS market has begun to evolve to include other middleware capabilities including process management. BPM PaaS is the delivery of BPM technology as a service via a cloud service provider. In order to be classified as a PaaS a BPM suite requires the following capabilities: the architecture should be multi-tenant, it should be hosted off premise and it should offer elasticity and metering by use capabilities. When we refer to BPM in the cloud what we are really referring to is a combination of BPM PaaS and BPaaS (Business Process as a Service). Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) is a set of pre-defined business processes that allows the execution of customized business processes in the cloud. BPaaS is a complete pre-integrated BPM platform hosted in the cloud and delivered as a service, for the development and execution of general-purpose business process application. Although such a service harbors an economic potential, questions that need to be answered are as follows: Can an individual and company-specific business process supported by a standardized cloud solution, or should we protect process creativity and competitive differentiation by allowing the company to design the processes individually and solely support basic data flows and structures? Does it make sense to take a software solution “out of the box” that handles both data and process in a cloud environment, or would this hinder the creativity of business (process) development leading to a lower quality of processes and consequently to a decrease in the competitive positioning of a company? How to manage the inherent compliance and security topic. Within a completely integrated business application system, all required security aspects can be implemented as safeguards with just enough money. Within the cloud, however, advanced standards and identity prove is required to monitor and measure information exchange across the federation. Thereby there seems to be no need for developing new protocols, but a standardized way to collect and evaluate the collected information.