A Flexible Accounting Model for Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is the new paradigm that has changed traditional computer business schemes: static, close, centralised, and proprietary methods cannot cope with the new requirements that have emerged. Still, this new scenario poses a number of opportunities to use and novel problems to be faced. Specifically, we focus on the accounting of cloud computing services. These may include relations between different service providers, user connections to different simultaneous services, and the need for new services to be incorporated into the accounting systems to enable emerging business models, and so on. Classic solutions fail to provide a proper answer as they were not specifically design for cloud computing. Against this background, we put forward a flexible accounting model that allows the deployment of cloud computing services to accomplish all the service providers´ requirements. Furthermore, we validate the model by presenting its implementation on a real cloud computing service.