Business-driven IT Management for Cloud computing providers

Nowadays, enterprises have high expectations on Cloud systems to achieve their Business-Level Objectives (BLOs). However, those systems are becoming very complex, thus leading to critical management issues. For these reasons, new self-management strategies of virtualized entities driven by business interests have to be explored. In this paper, we present a business-driven self-management optimization loop, which can firmly contribute to fulfill business strategies of Cloud providers. In this sense, a Business-Driven IT Management (BDIM) model is aimed to assess the impact of IT-related events on business-level metrics. Thereupon those high-level impacts are consumed by a policy management frame-work able to autonomously determine the most suitable IT-level management actions in terms of provider´s BLOs compliance. Furthermore, we show the benefits achieved by a Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider when adopting such business-driven management. The results obtained through experimen-tation demonstrate that it is able to maximize, individually and simultaneously, two high-level objectives, in this case economical profit and ecological efficiency.