T-Check in System-of-Systems Technologies: Cloud Computing

This technical note presents the results of applying the T-Check method in an initial investigation of cloud computing. In this report, three hypotheses are examined: (1) an organization can use its existing infrastructure simultaneously with cloud resources with relative ease; (2) cloud computing environments provide ways to continuously update the amount of resources allocated to an organization; and (3) it is possible to move an application's resources between cloud computing providers, with varying levels of effort required. From the T-Check investigation, the first hypothesis is partially sustained and the last two hypotheses are fully sustained within the context specified for the investigation. From an engineering perspective, cloud computing is a distributed computing paradigm that focuses on providing a wide range of users with distributed access to virtualized hardware and/or software infrastructure over the internet. From a business perspective, it is the availability of computing resources that are scalable and billed on a usage basis. While scalability is the primary tenet of cloud computing, a host of other advantages are advertised as being inherently obtained through cloud computing.