Cloud services

Cloud computing has been widely referred as a promising technology by the Information Technology community. The market of Cloud services expects an increase of hundreds of billions of dollars in the next years. Currently, most services are being offered by centralized datacenters over the Internet, which imposes limitations such as non-guaranteed end-to-end quality of service and relative low security. The network control owned by telecommunications providers may be considered as a major competitive differential for companies that plan to join the cloud services market. Among the different cloud service models, the Infrastructure as a Service model can be considered as the most appropriate model for telecom providers in the cloud market since it is the less complex option and it can be used as a basis for deploying the other models. In order to take advantage of their network reachability, telecom providers should consider a distributed architecture and other architectural decisions to support multi-tenancy, migration of virtual machines and prevent vendor lock-in. Another important aspect when designing cloud services is the choice of tools for deploying these services. The tools should meet as many requirements as needed in order to provide services in a proper and successful manner. This paper aims to discuss some important aspects as to serve as a reference guide for telecom providers and service providers that wish to enter the cloud services market.