A service‐oriented taxonomical spectrum, cloudy challenges and opportunities of cloud computing

SUMMARY Cloud computing has emerged as a popular computing milieu that provides a range of delivering solutions for small to large enterprises with a flexible model that allows a computing power and storing space for the large volumetric data within minimum cost. These days, computational paradigm is shifting towards utility‐based pay‐as‐you‐go model and many discussion aside, but there remains no canonical definition of cloud computing yet. In this paper we have proposed a service‐oriented taxonomical spectrum of cloud computing, which is more focused on the service engineering perspective of cloud. Our argument behind cloud engineering is a layered structural approach ‘as a Service’ such as security as a service, fault tolerance as a service, architecture as a service. The main contribution of this paper is to identify a wide spectrum of taxonomy, aiming at a better understanding of functional as well as architectural components that could benefit from cloudification. We describe each sub‐taxonomy (architecture, core services, security, fault tolerance, management services etc.) in details. In addition, we present a comparative study of several cloud systems based on taxonomy. Moreover, it also identifies many challenges and opportunities that exist on the landscape of enterprise cloud. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.