Towards Living Landscape Models: Automated Integration of Infrastructure Cloud in Enterprise Architecture Management

Abstract

Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM), and in particular IT--landscape management try to model the IT- and business elements of a company, in order to analyze its efficiency towards supporting business goals, optimize business--IT alignment, and to plan future IT--transformation as well as IT--standardization. A major challenge in this field is the elicitation of infrastructure information from run--time systems, e.g., to answer the question which servers provide services to a specific information system. Capturing this data is a time consuming manual task which leads to quickly outdated information. Similar to traditional hardware, cloud infrastructure needs to be documented in an EA modeling order to gain insight on its relationships with business information systems and ultimately the business goals. The aim of our research in this area is the automatic integration of various runtime information sources into an EAM view. The overall goal is to minimize manual work to keep enterprise architecture information up--to--date. This enables enterprise architects to make timely and precise decisions. In this work we focus on how information on the cloud infrastructure can be seamlessly integrated into an EA view. Making the cloud visible for enterprise architects is especially important to meet legal (privacy) requirements, on the storage and processing location of data. We present a conceptual approach for the information integration problem, and introduce our prototypical implementation with the open--source infrastructure cloud implementation Eucalyptus, and the open--source enterprise architecture management tool iteraplan.