Chapter 6 Information Technology Resources Virtualization ......The fundamental idea behind...

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Chapter 6

INTRODUCTION: GENERAL PERSPECTIVE OF VIRTUALIZATION

Modern computer systems are now sufficiently powerful to present users with the illusion that one physical machine consists of multiple virtual

machines, each one running a separate and pos-sibly different instance of an operating system. Today, virtualization can apply to a range of system layers, including hardware, operating system and high-level language virtual machines.

Virtual machine concept was in existence since 1960 when it was first developed by IBM to provide concurrent, interactive access to a

Malgorzata PankowskaUniversity of Economics in Katowice, Poland

Information Technology Resources Virtualization for Sustainable Development

ABSTRACT

Nowadays business organizations seem to be involved in the processes of sustainable development. Therefore, not only economic indicators of performance are considered but also – the environmental responsibility is equally important. The environmental responsibility covers social responsibility and natural environment responsibility. The last one demands taking into account promotion of sustainable use of renewable natural resources, reducing the emissions and wastages, and decrease of energy con-sumption. The first part of the chapter includes presentation of benefits resulting from IT (Information Technology) resources virtualization, Grid computing and cloud computing development. The second part contains a model of IT governance for sustainability. The main important factors included in the model concern IT strategy, business strategy, IT management, business agreements.

DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-531-5.ch006

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mainframe computer (Cala & Zielinski, 2007). The fundamental idea behind virtualization is to introduce an additional layer of indirection in ac-cessing resources so that a lower-level resource can be transparently mapped to multiple higher-level resources or vice versa. Each level has its own virtualization control layer which is responsible for management and enforcement of mapping between level n and n+1 of virtualized resources. So virtualization decision may be performed during the system configuration phase or even in the run-time. The lowest layer of the hierarchy represents physical resources. The virtualization of resources is a powerful tool for creating advanced data network services. A major advantage of the virtualization of network functionality through abstraction techniques is increased flexibility in service creation, provisioning and differentiation.

The main purpose of the infrastructure-level virtualization is to provide an abstracted view of a collection of discrete computer, data, application, network and storage resources for the purpose of hiding complexity and improving flexibility and productivity. An important beginning to the virtualization process is to recognize that series of components could be better managed if they are abstracted. As these abstractions are crafted in an appropriate and ultimately productive man-ner, the predominant interactions remain with the individual components. In this way, virtualization also provides both an opportunity and the means to abstract away complexity. It offers customers the opportunity to build more efficient IT infra-structures. Virtualization is seen as a step on the road to utility computing. With virtualization, the logical functions of the server, storage and network elements are separated from their physical func-tions (e.g. processor, memory, controllers, disks and switches). In other words, all servers, stor-age and network devices can be aggregated into independent pools of resources. Elements from these pools can then be allocated, provisioned, and managed, manually or automatically, to meet the

changing needs and priorities of one’s business (Minoli, 2005).

BACKGROUND - INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY INFRASTRUCTURE VIRTUALIZATION

Virtualization is a broad term encompassing a set of several deployment and management features and could be defined as a technique used to abstract the physical characteristics of the resources of a system from other systems, applications or users interacting with those resources (IBM, 2008). The virtualization can make a single physical re-source appear to be multiple logical resources, or multiple physical resources appear to be a single logical resource.

Virtualization is viewed as:

• File virtualization: multiple files aggregat-ed into a large file, presents integrated file interface,

• Software virtualization: enabling users to use more-efficient, high-performance hard-ware to support hundreds of applications and several operating systems in a single system. Applications are used in data path, or in “plug-and-play” way from host view,

• Desktop virtualization: providing the ac-cess from anywhere for convenience and to ensure business continuity and disaster recovery,

• Workstation virtualization: enabling the centralized control of data and the efficient administration of them among multiple us-ers in different locations,

• Storage virtualization: enabling users to centralize data storage to protect data, im-prove security and disaster recovery, and accelerate data backups, while desktop vir-tualization enables moving of data, appli-cations, and processing away from desktop

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PCs onto secure, cost-efficient virtualized network resources, replacing PCs with virtualized thin-client computers (Moore, 2006).

Storage virtualization automates tedious and extremely time-consuming storage administra-tion tasks. This means the storage administrator can perform the tasks of backup, archiving, and recovery more easily and in less time. Storage virtualization is commonly used in file systems, storage area networks (SANs), switches and vir-tual tape systems. Users can implement storage virtualization with software, hybrid hardware or software appliances. Storage virtualization provides many advantages. It is the pooling of multiple physical storage resources into single storage resource that is centrally managed. So it is a way to reduce complexity of resources management. The second advantage is that it automates many time-consuming tasks. Consider-ing the scarcity of trained storage personnel, this advantage becomes increasingly important as IT business grows. Third, the storage virtualization can be used to hide the overall complexity of IT infrastructure. Server virtualization can help to provide standard enterprise environment across the organizations desktops. Virtual servers com-bine deployment software with preconfigured deployment, making it easier to introduce new services and applications, faster and easier than if they are rolled out conventionally. It is possible to move legacy systems from an old server to a new server, which will consume less energy and help to save costs. While ideally it seems that having one virtualized server will reduce both energy and hardware costs, one should be cautious in consolidating servers since it may run the risk of losing everything in case the server fails (Garg et al., 2010).

End users have four choices for control the virtualization architecture:

• Virtualization is provided by software that is installed on the host or on all application hosts,

• The virtualization engine is an out-of-band solution, that passes the virtual volume de-scriptions to the application hosts,

• The virtualization engine is an in-band so-lution located in the data path so that every request travels through that device,

• Virtualization is provided in the storage ar-chitecture by switches and array controller microcode (Tomic & Markic, 2010).

Virtualization supports cost savings by reduc-ing hardware. By consolidating servers, reducing down time and improving application performance and freeing up critical resources, virtualization helps to save up to 80% of running costs (Garg et al., 2010).

The most spectacular achievements of IT resources virtualization have been noticed in VMware. The VMware technologies enable data centers’ decrease of electricity consumption by 70-80% and provide a flexible computing environ-ment with much additional operational efficiency, including business continuity, rapid provisioning and automation, and standardized operating pro-cedures (Poniatowski, 2010). Now, with VMware vSphere 4.0 the 100% virtual data center is capable of handling the most mission–critical workloads on virtual machines. Usually, 30-40 virtual machines are found on a single multicore server. VMware is considered as the clear leader in virtual server software selection. According to Forrester Re-search Inc. survey 98% of respondents indicating that they have ESX in their environment, 17% of respondents state that they use either Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 or Hyper-V, closely followed by Citrix’s Xen Server at 10%. Respondents no-ticed the benefits in a virtual server environment i.e. 23% of respondents ranked performance, 19% named backup success, and 14% named capacity efficiency (Poniatowski, 2010).

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Strategies for lowering overall energy con-sumption include a broad range of activities. Microsoft IT has been engaged in projects, which are targeted data center, various layers of the applications and specific server workloads. Consolidation efforts include Right Sizing, Stor-age Utility, Compute Utility, File Server Utility and the SQL Server consolidation initiative to ensure energy efficiency, and elimination of un-necessary hardware. In addition to environmental sustainability benefits, SQL Server consolidation presents clear business benefits, such as:

• Reduction of operating and capital expenses,

• Reduction in data center space,• Provision of business continuity, scalabil-

ity and availability,• Provision of a standardized server build

library.

The SQL Server Utility is oriented to eliminate manual steps needed to build an application en-vironment. This can be achieved by establishing Hyper-V guests, which are built with standard software configuration, including the operating system, SQL Server, tools and approved configu-rations which can be provided for use in different phases of the software development life cycle.

Grid Computing

Grid computing has been an attempt to manage the high number of computing nodes in distributed data centers and to achieve better utilization of dis-tributed and heterogeneous computing resources in companies. Advances in virtualization technol-ogy enable greater decoupling between physical computing resources and software applications and promise higher industry adoption of distrib-uted computing concepts such as grid and cloud. The continuous increase of maintenance costs and demand for additional resources as well as for scalability and flexibility of resources is leading

many companies to consider outsourcing their data centers to external providers offering their services in grids and clouds. The first category is focused on achieving optimized and flexible processes and lower costs by improving resource utilization. At the core of this category are innova-tions facilitating:

• Better utilization of computing power and data storage,

• On-demand provision of additional com-puting power and storage in order to re-spond to peaks in consumption,

• Aggregation of heterogeneous data sourc-es in virtual data-stores.

The second category focuses on collaboration and resource sharing. At the core of this category are innovations improving:

• The agility of businesses and their abil-ity to respond to business opportunity by enabling the swift establishment of multi-enterprise collaborations,

• The execution of collaborative processes spanning across-enterprise boundaries,

• Provision and access to shared network-hosted (cloud) services that facilitate collaboration,

• Seamless access to heterogeneous geo-graphically distributed data sources (Stanoevska-Slabeva & Wozniak, 2010).

Grid computing is basically deployed grid middleware or the computing enabled by grid middleware based on flexible, secure, coordinated resource sharing among a dynamic collection of individuals, institutions and resources. Grid computing means that heterogeneous pools of servers, storage systems and networks are pooled together in a virtualized system that is exposed to the user as a single computing entity. The main functionalities of a grid middleware are:

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• Heterogeneous autonomous resource vir-tualization and integration,

• Provision of information about resources and their availability,

• Flexible and dynamic resource allocation and management,

• Brokerage of resources,• Security and trust in IT resources availabil-

ity, security includes authentication (asser-tion and confirmation of the identity of a user) and authorization (check of rights to access certain services or data of users as well as accountability,

• Billing and payments for IT resources access,

• Delivery of non-trivial Quality of Service (QoS) (Reichman, 2009).

Grid computing has emerged as an attempt to provide users with the illusion of an infinitely pow-erful, easy-to-use computer, which can solve very complex problems. This very appealing illusion is to be provided: 1) by relying on the aggregated power of standard (thus inexpensive), geographi-cally distributed resources owned by multiple organizations 2) by hiding as much as possible the complexity of the distributed infrastructure to users. Grid computing is the technology that enables resource virtualization, on-demand provi-sioning, and service (or resource) sharing between organizations. Using the utility computing model and grid computing aims at providing ubiquitous digital market of services. Frameworks providing these virtualized services must adhere to the set of standards ensuring interoperability, which is well described, open, and non-proprietary and commonly accepted in the community. Grid computing is the logical step on the IT market to the ubiquitous connectivity, virtualization, service outsourcing, product commoditization, and glo-balization (Plaszczak &Wellner, 2006). Examples of grid computing virtual organizations are widely described in literature (Bubak et al., 2008).

Virtual organizations now find a new way for further development in grid environment. Grid technology provides means for harnessing the computational and storage power of widely distributed collections of computers. Computing grids are usually very large scale services that enable the sharing of heterogeneous resources (hardware and software) over an open network such as the Internet. A grid is organized in virtual organizations, collection of computational and storage resources, application software, as well as individuals (end-users) that usually have a common research area. Access to grid resources is provided to virtual organization members through the grid middleware, which exposes high-level programming and communication functionalities to application programmers and end-users, enforc-ing some level of resource virtualization. Virtual organization membership and service brokerage are regulated by access and usage policies agreed among the infrastructure operators, the resource providers and the resource consumers.

In essence, grid computing is aiming to help standardize the way for distributed computing. A standard-based open architecture promotes extensibility, interoperability and portability.

Virtual organization is an open and temporal integration of autonomic units. The openness, temporality, adhocratism and heterogeneity of resources are the reasons why the organizations act in ODOE (On Demand Operating Environment). It defines a set of integration and infrastructure management capabilities that enterprises can utilize, in a modular and incremental fashion, to become an on demand business. These are each unique services that work together to perform a variety of on demand business function. ODOE must be responsive to dynamic and unpredictable changes, variable to adapt to processes and cost structures to reduce risk, focused on core compe-tencies and differentiated capabilities, resilient to manage changes and external threats, flexible, self-managing, scalable, economical, resilient, based on open standards. ODOE may be the construction

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of the future, nevertheless, autonomic computing is focused on the most pressing problem facing the IT industry today: the increased complexity of the IT infrastructure that typically accompanies the increased business value delivered through computing advancements. The problem is con-tributing to an increasing inability of business to absorb new technology and solutions.

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is the use of the Internet (cloud) combined with a variety of computer technologies, such as software applications, servers, storage and networking components. Cloud computing is now being used in a hybrid model, whereby companies are splitting their workloads between their own data center and the cloud. A cloud is a pool of virtualized computer resources. Cloud computing is resulting from the convergence of grid computing, utility computing and SaaS (Soft-ware as a Service) and essentially represents the increasing trend towards the external deployment of IT resources, such as computational power, stor-age or business applications and obtaining them as services. Cloud computing refers to both the applications delivered as services over the Internet and the hardware and system software in the data centers that provide the services. The data center hardware and software is what is named a cloud (Stanoevska-Slabeva & Wozniak, 2010a). When cloud resources are made available in a pay-as-you-go manner to the general public, it is called a public cloud. In public clouds services provider is the owner and manager, services are accessible by subscription, and driven by standardization. The term private cloud refers to internal data centers of a business or other organization, not made available to the general public. Private clouds allow for services defined by company, facilitate service customization, retain services utilization control integrity and improve interorganizational efficiency. In cloud the virtualized services are provided through a defined abstracting interface

API (Application Programming Interface). Thus at the hardware level, resources can be added or withdrawn according to demand posted through the interface, while the interface to the user is not changing. Because some cloud computing envi-ronments use server and storage grid architecture, cloud computing is sometimes confused with grid computing. In theory, cloud-computing is similar to utility-based computing or traditional outsourc-ing. There are many benefits to cloud computing besides the reduction of infrastructure cost and operational support. Because the infrastructure resides at the cloud provider, capital expendi-tures are minimized. This includes data center real estate, electricity, cooling, server, storage, network technology procurement, and the cost of resources to manage the environment. Reducing time to market on the release of new applications is also a benefit. Some cloud providers offer a set of development tools that can reduce the time to develop new applications from months to weeks. Cloud services providers realize the efficiencies of a virtualized environment with resource manage-ment to maximize resource utilization efficiencies. There is a growing number of cloud computing providers. Some of the dominant on the market are Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Salesforce.com, EMC, Amazon, Google. HP offers a variety of cloud services; HP’s strategy is the company’s entrance into cloud computing with HP Adaptive Infrastructure as a Service (AIaaS), which lets customers host applications in HP data centers optimized for Microsoft Exchange, SAP applications, and other critical business applica-tions. Providers such as Google and Amazon offer cloud-computing solutions for e-mail, collabora-tion, and other web-related services. Googles Apps cloud covers services such as email and collaboration. The tools are available to subscrib-ers and are completely web-based. Google Apps offers voice and video chat, calendars, and instant messaging, a service to store documents, provide content management and provide secure video sharing. Amazon EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute

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Cloud) is a web service that provide computing capacity in the cloud. Amazon EC2’s web service interface allows clients to obtain and configure capacity. It runs within Amazon’s data centers, and is managed by Amazon’s technical support staff. Amazon EC2 helps provision new server resources via the Internet without the hardware and operational expenses (Poniatowski, 2010).

Cloud computing is a way to increase capac-ity and add capabilities without investing in new infrastructure, training new staff and licensing new software. By pooling resources into large clouds, companies can cut down costs and increase uti-lization by delivering resources only for as long as those resources are needed. Cloud computing allows individuals, teams and organizations to streamline procurement processes and eliminate the need to duplicate certain computer adminis-trative skills related to configuration and support. A cloud computing have the potential to reduce enterprise energy dependency. Today data cen-ters are overcrowded, consuming a huge amount of energy resources. Cloud computing allows companies to evolve to a greener, more holistic approach for data center management, permits to achieve greater economies of scale, workload balancing and the integration of IT services with power and facilities management. With its focus on resource conservation, cloud computing en-courages goods service management practices like enterprise content management, which helps keep the volume of active data under control via regular archival and disposal of redundant data.

Companies and government agencies are using cloud computing to make services and applica-tions accessible and economical for emerging nations – providing the means to improve their agriculture production, healthcare, education systems (CIO, 2009). Around the world people with mobile devices will be able to connect with a cloud infrastructure for real-time services and information. IBM recommends that companies put in place three fundamental prerequisites in order to accelerate enterprise adoption and optimize

return on investment: dynamic infrastructure, IT services affinity assessment and cloud strategy.

Virtualization, which is regarded as the corner-stone technology for all cloud computing archi-tecture is mainly used for abstraction and sharing the IT resources. Virtualization allows unifying raw hardware, storage and network resources as well as encapsulation of resources i.e. applications ultimately improve security, manageability and isolation. Another important feature of clouds is the integration of hardware and system software with applications. Both hardware and system software, or infrastructure and the applications are offered as a service in an integrated manner.

IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) offers com-prise computing resources such as processing or storage which can be obtained as a service. Examples are Amazon Web Services with its EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) for processing and S3 (Simple Storage Service) for storage. Instead of selling raw hardware infrastructure, IaaS provid-ers typically offer virtualized infrastructure as a service. Therefore, hardware level resources are abstracted and encapsulated and exposed to up-per layer and to end users through standardized interface as unified resources. PaaS (Platforms as a Service) offers are targeted at software devel-opers, which can write applications according to the specification of a particular platform without needing to worry about the underlying hardware infrastructure. PaaS offers can cover all phases of software development or may be specialized around a specific area like content management. Examples are the Google App Engine, which allows applications to be run on Google’ infra-structure and Salesforce’s Force.com platform. Software as a Service (SaaS) is software that is managed and distributed in a pay-per-use man-ner. For user, obtaining software as a service is mainly motivated by cost advantages due to the utility-based payment model. Examples of SaaS offers are Salesforce.com and Google Apps such as Google Mail and Google Docs and Spreadsheets (Stanoevska-Slabeva & Wozniak, 2010a).

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Virtualization, cloud computing and grid com-puting are perceived as a green computing which is oriented towards the use of computers in an environmentally responsible way. “The Recycle, Reuse and Reduce” strategy has been adapted by several companies to get rid of non-biogradable materials such as PCs and laptops which can no longer be used. First step of the approach is an analysis and evaluation of IT resources usability. The results should be included as the premises of decisions on virtualization. The green computing approach covers many different activities to reduce energy consumption and harmful emissions. Re-cycled paper is also being used at offices to reduce the paper consumption. Dell company offers to collect and recycle desktops and laptops which can no longer be used. Green computing is to include the deployment of energy efficient serv-ers, peripherals and central processing units with reduced resource utilization (Garg et al., 2010).

MAIN FOCUS OF THE CHAPTER: FROM VIRTUALIZATION TECHNOLOGY TO VIRTUALIZATION MANAGEMENT

In 1987, the WCED (the World Commission on Environment and Development) related sustainability to corporations and the economy by defining the term sustainable development as the development that meets the needs of the present without comprising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (Russell et al., 2007, Clarke, 2007, Hilty & Seifert, 2005). The concept of corporate sustainability is one that is gaining increasing importance as progressively more research suggests the need for organizations to address sustainability issues in order to resolve environmental and social problems.

Sustainability is interpreted as the simultaneous effort of balancing economic, technological and environmental goals for a corporation. As such sustainability is another metaphor for describing

corporate social responsibility, corporate citizen-ship and ethical business conduct. The etymology of “sustainable” carries interesting and important implications for the way the word is used as it in-cludes several contradictions. The word “sustain” is derived form the Latin “sub-tenere”, meaning “to uphold”. This carries as passive connotation in it and gives the concept an image of stability, persistence and balance. “Sustainable” is used in a more active sense together with “develop-ment”. Development means change, progress and growth. Hence, ”sustainable development” can refer to a process which is being uphold or defended at the same time as it implies move-ment and improvement (Sunden and Wicander, 2005). Sustainable development is interpreted as a change that emanate out from a need or demand. The concept of sustainable development implies a resource dimension and a competition between the different interest of stakeholders for resources (IT resources also). Therefore, the model of sustain-able development should be negotiated among business partners. The compromise achieved in sustainable collaborations of business partners is to provide some direct economic benefits:

• Revenue enhancement and improved mar-ket access,

• Cost reduction and joint projects develop-ment focused on internal activities, servic-es that access the best through the network, improved purchasing outcomes from buy-ing as a group,

• IT assets utilization as well as the shared access to intellectual assets,

• Lead time reduction and concurrent engi-neering practices development,

• Reliability enhancement through invest-ment initiatives reduces work, schedule consistency supported by redundancy of resources, and client communications,

• Risk reduction: financial through shar-ing the new market entry costs, access to

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complementary competencies and larger experiences (Beckett, 2005).

Sustainability is also considered in IT gov-ernance domain. IT governance concerns IT practices of boards and senior managers. The question is whether IT structures, processes and relational mechanisms and IT decisions are made in the interest of stakeholders. IT governance is closely related to corporate governance, the struc-ture of the IT organization and its objectives and alignment to the business objectives. However, IT governance is the process for controlling an organization’s IT resources, including informa-tion and communication systems and technology.

According to the IT Governance Institute (ITGI, 2003), IT governance is the responsibility of executives and board of directors and consists of leadership, organizational structures and pro-cesses that ensure that enterprise’s IT sustains and extends the organization’s strategies and objec-tives. Van Grembergen and DeHaes (2005) stand on that point and defined IT governance as the organizational capacity exercised by the Board, executive management and IT management to control the formulation and implementation of IT strategy and in this way ensure the fusion of busi-ness and IT. The primary focus of IT governance is on the responsibility of the board and executive management to control the formulation and the implementation of IT strategy, to ensure the align-ment of IT and business, to identify metrics for measuring business value of IT and to manage IT risks in an effective way. While IT management is compared to the daily operational management, IT governance is much more focused on sustainable performing and transforming IT and compared to strategic management. IT governance focuses areas are (ITGI, 2003):

• Business and IT strategic alignment,• IT value creation and delivery,• Risk management and value presentation,• IT resource management,

• Performance measurement.

Models of IT governance for sustainability need to concentrate more on changes than stability, meaning that existing rules, practices and rights are perceived as a subject matter of governance. According to Martin et al. (2007) the challenges of governance for sustainability lie in three broad areas of change and knowledge generation i.e. innovations, reconciliation and creativity.

In this chapter, sustainability is a concept and strategy for integrating and balancing three dimensions i.e. economic and social, technology and communication and the third – environmental. Sustainable business strategies and processes are roadmaps to achieve sustainability and to un-derstand and consider the positive and negative impacts and minimizing the risk of unintended consequences across sustainability dimensions. Strategy process research covers the way busi-ness strategies are created, sustained and changed over time, whereas strategy content addresses the product of the strategy process and constitutes a competitive advantage. The basic question is whether structure follows strategy (Chandler, 1962) or strategy follows structure (Rumelt, 1974). The structure is equated with internal efficiency whereas strategy represents external effectiveness. According to Chandler the environment specifies the strategy and the organization has to adapt accordingly by adjusting the structure. From the perspective of a strategy context, the assumption that internal structure follows external strategic intent overlooks that internal structure also enacts the external strategy (Rasche, 2008).

Strategy followed by structure is developed for virtualized resources’ users, so they are able to construct their own business strategies assum-ing joint access and sharing virtualized storages and computing capabilities. The business strat-egy is the determination of long term goals and objectives, the adoption of courses of action and associated allocation of resources required to achieve strategic goals. Changes in IT resources,

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in the organizational structure and IT resources virtualization opportunities lead to determining a new organizational strategy. Therefore, the strategy realization must be followed by enter-prise engineering and virtualization opportunities analysis as well as the utilization of the feedback for the strategy re-formulation. The business strategy can be identified with a selected way of creating a fit between external environment and internal resources and capabilities. Business and IT strategy are evaluated in the aspect of their internal consistency, ability to be suitable and adaptable to the changing business environment, abilities to ensure competitive advantage or just their flexibility. A comprehensive representation of a business sustainability model is needed to understand its dynamic behavior, processes, re-sources, internal and external stakeholders and the constraints. Business modeling by processes facilitates developing business strategy, conduct-ing business operations and designing informa-tion systems aligned with business organization and procedures. In this chapter, the sustainability model is an integrated model of environmental, informational, social and economic dimensions of business that helps to understand the complexities and impact of sustainability issues (see Figure 1). The sustainable business development approach begins with developing sustainable business

strategies and applying these strategies to tacti-cal decision making and operational procedures, which in turn requires reorganization and redesign of business processes.

There are three points to the strategic planning process i.e. identifying top priorities related to sustainable development, making strategies op-erational, recognition of risk and business op-portunities. The reformulation and redesign of the business and IT strategy can be realized through comprehensive modeling of a business using critical success factors and key performance in-dicators (see Figure 1). Existing enterprise systems may not capture the data required for sustain-ability modeling and reporting.

The IT governance for sustainability is de-termined by business strategy, management ap-proach, performance indicators, IT strategy, IT management and virtualization opportunities. The economic dimension of sustainability concerns the organization’s impact on the economic conditions of its stakeholders and on economic systems at local, national and global levels. Economic per-formance indicators cover economic performance measures (e.g. financial implications and other risks as well as social responsibility measures), image on markets and indirect economic impacts. The environmental dimension of sustainability concerns an organization’s impacts on living and

Figure 1. IT governance for business sustainability

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non-living natural systems (including ecosystems, land, air and water) and outputs (e.g. harmful emissions and wastages). They cover performance to biodiversity, environmental compliance and other relevant information such as environmental expenditures and their impacts on products and services. The business strategy should integrate long-term economic and environmental aspects and the evaluations based on the indicators ought to be utilized in further business strategy re-formulation. IT governance for sustainability means a balance among the economic activities and environmental responsibilities (including social responsibility). Although business orga-nizations are oriented towards creating value for the company’s shareholders, the environmental responsibility is equally important. Economic indicators include measures of a competitive re-turn on investment, of protecting the company’s assets and enhancing the company’s reputation and brand image through integration of sustainable development thinking with business practices. Building capacity for further economic devel-opment, supporting the protection and efficient exploitation of IT resources, promoting positive attitude of employees towards energy consumption monitoring and controlling of IT assets should also be considered. The business organization should make a distinction between IT strategy and IT management. IT strategy is an objective, but IT management approach is a process accompanied by actions. Talking about strategy as an organiza-tional capability means strategy management i.e. the constant renewal of strategy to align and keep pace with the evolution of customer and market-place needs. New information technology expands the business strategy, because it uncovers the new opportunities that organization can explore i.e. IT resources virtualization. Following Mintzberg and Queen (1991), the strategy is considered as a plan. The general plan for IT resources virtualization could cover the steps:

• Understanding the benefits of virtualiza-tion, so issues like saving money, simpli-fication of management, disaster recovery opportunities, emissions’ reduction should be analyzed,

• Evaluating a virtualization solution, and selecting the right services providers,

• Verification if applications are going to work properly with virtualization,

• Analyzing the cost of virtualization of server infrastructure,

• Analyzing the time and capabilities needed to virtualize the IT resources i.e. server, storage, desktops.

However, given a vision to achieve sustain-able IT resources virtualization development, the following principles are applied:

• Continual refinement of the products and project practices (assuming that IT resources virtualization has been done through projects),

• Working products and services at all times,• Continual investment in and emphasis on

design,• Valuing defect prevention over defect de-

tection (Tate, 2005).

IT products and services for sustainability should always be in a state of continual con-struction as any working prototypes. This ap-proach allows increasing the products’ quality. Properly working products are also required for sustainable development because it ensures that the manufacturing time was spent on productive activities. A constant emphasis on designs should also be required for sustainable development because innovative technologies, good designs and sustainable design practices extend the life of the products by keeping their exploitation in a healthy state, which simplify the maintainability processes.

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Without establishing and monitoring perfor-mance measures, it is unlikely that the IT gov-ernance will achieve its desired outcomes. The performance measurement domain closes the loop and provides feedback to the alignment domain by providing evidence that the IT governance initiative is on track and creating the opportunity to take timely corrective measures. Beneficiaries of IT resources sharing in virtualization processes and in virtual organizations, although they are temporal, exist on a long-term basis. Participating companies find agreements, for example, on the goals, on the internal rules of providing services i.e. IaaS, SaaS, PaaS. All members have to agree upon rules on how to allocate rules and tasks and consequently on how to share profit and losses, also for tax purposes in compliance with appli-cable rules and regulations (Cevenini, 2002). As a general principle, partners can regulate their relationships by agreement, but agreements cannot possibly cover each and every present and future task and interactions. They may be renewed or rewritten; otherwise the stability of rules would be lost. For what is not specifically provided for in the agreements, codes and law in force can be applied. An agreement is an arrangement between parties regarding a method of action. The goal of this arrangement is to regulate the cooperation ac-tions among partners and it is always associated with a contract (Camarinha-Matos et al., 2005).

A contract is an agreement between two or more competent parties in which an offer is made and accepted and each party benefits. A contract defines the duties, rights, and obligations of the parties, remedy clauses as well as other clauses that are important to characterize the goal of the contract. In a maturing IT governance environ-ment, service level agreements (SLAs) and their supporting service level management (SLM) process need to play an important role. The func-tions of SLAs are:

• To define what levels of service are accept-able by users and attainable by the service provider,

• To define the mutually acceptable and agreed-upon set of indicators of the quality of service.

The SLM process includes defining an SLA framework, establishing SLAs including level of service and their corresponding metrics, monitor-ing and reporting on the achieved services and problems encountered, reviewing SLAs and establishing improvement programs. The major governance challenges are that the service levels are to be expressed in business terms and the right SLM/SLA process has to be put in place. The roles most commonly given to SLAs can generally be grouped into six areas:

• Defining roles and accountability. In vir-tual organizations a service provider in one SLA can be the customer in another SLA and vice versa. Service level agreements will be used to re-establish the chain of accountability.

• Managing the customer’s expectations re-garding a product’s delivery on three per-formance levels (from the top): engineered level, delivered level, guaranteed level.

• Control implementation and execution, al-though customers tend to use SLAs to en-sure preferential treatment for their partic-ular service requirements relative to all the others in the service provider’s network.

• Providing verification on the customer side. This is especially important to com-panies that opt for higher levels of QoS.

• Enabling communications for both service providers and customers to address their needs, expectations, performance relative to those expectations and progress on ac-tion items (Lee & Ben-Natan, 2001, Ruijs & Schotanus, 2002, Scholz & Turowski, 2002).

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The goal of SLM is to maintain and improve IT service quality through a constant cycle of agreeing, monitoring, reporting and reviewing IT service achievements (Maestranzi et al., 2002, Gatial et al., 2008). The SLM process is respon-sible for ensuring the service level agreements and any underpinning operational level agreements (OLAs) or contracts are met, and for ensuring that any adverse impact on service quality is kept to a minimum. The process involves assessing the impact of changes upon service quality and SLAs, both when changes are proposed and after they have been implemented. Some of the most impor-tant targets set in the SLAs will relate to service availability and thus require incident resolution within agreed periods.

FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS AND CONCLUSIONS

Sustainability exemplifies the new problem field for managers and corporate leaders: an emerging network-based organizational world where busi-ness units must maintain consistency of purpose and identity, although they must be flexible enough to interact and compete in conditions of constant change, to share IT resources and to add new capabilities, to reduce energy consumption and emissions of harmful substances.

The factors influencing on sustainability are competences, resources, project management, IT management, organizational integration, policy and regulatory framework, business strategies and conflict resolution abilities. In the IT resources virtualization networked approach partners (who may compete in other areas of marketplace) join to share the resources in the value creation process. Participating in an IT resources virtualization network is an increasingly strong motivator for accessing required capabilities. The customers, taking into account the observed benefits, are able to emphasize their requirements concerning the IT services. Partnering enables a joint development

of business opportunities, mutual understanding and trust among service recipients and providers.

Using the utility computing model, grid aims at provisioning the virtualized services, that must adhere to the set of standards ensuring interoper-ability, access and common acceptance within the community of beneficiaries of IT resources’ virtualization. The benefits of virtualization cover more effective utilization of common IT resources, common access to more resources with unique capabilities, increase of efficiency of IT resources utilization, and cost efficiency of IT.

Grid computing or private cloud computing are about controlled sharing. Resources owners want to enforce policies that constrain access according to group membership and abilities to pay. The grid computing and cloud computing are technologies not yet mature. That innovations development should be accompanied by the focus on business models to support management of the virtualization processes.

For the last few years, focus on environmen-tal sustainability issues influences on green IT concepts, emphasizing the reducton of the envi-ronmental impact of doing business and the IT development. Therefore more control over user activities, cost savings reporting are necessary, however at first pro-ecological approach should be implemented in the business strategy manage-ment process.

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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS

Virtualization: The software technology, re-ferring to the abstraction of computer resources,

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enabling implementation of virtual machines working like a real machines.

Grid Computing: The technology enabling resource virtualization, on demand computing, and service (or resource) sharing between or-ganizations. It enables sharing of a wide range of resources including storage, networks and scientific instruments such as microscopes, x-ray sources, and earthquake engineering test facilities.

Cloud Computing: The use of the Internet combined with a variety of computer technologies, such as software applications, servers, storage and networking components. The components provide access to Software as a Service (SaaS), Web 2.0 and other common Internet-related services.

ODOE: The business computing model en-abling business flexibility and IT simplification,

integration of people, processes and information in a Service Oriented Architecture.

SLA: A Service Level Agreement, it is a part of Information Technology service contract, where the level of service is formally defined.

IT Strategy: Objective and plan of deployment of Information Technology.

IT Governance: IT governing system, in which all stakeholders have the necessary input into the decision making process as well as abili-ties to control and affect the performance of an organization.

Sustainability: The capabilities of long-term maintenance of wellbeing as well as the respon-sibility for the utilization of natural resources.

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