Hosting mission-critical applications on cloud: Technical issues and challenges

Deployment in Cloud of applications affected by restrictive security and dependability requirements, and currently considered too critical to be hosted on existing public Clouds, can be a challenge, but at the same time, a necessity for owners of mission-critical applications and services and a new business opportunity for federated Clouds. In particular, new paradigms should be designed to leverage the greater scalability and elasticity offered by federated Cloud infrastructures, as well as tools should be developed to implement a more secure, resilient and performing inter-cloud ecosystem. Such solutions can enable application owners to control in a finer-grained manner the security and dependability of their resources across federated Clouds, in order to satisfy the same critical requirements achieved by hosting the application on its private Cloud. This paper presents the main technical issues and challenges, which must be addressed to migrate mission-critical applications on public Clouds.