During the past few years enterprise services have been leveraging cloud-based technologies for several reasons including scalability and automated provisioning capabilities [1, 2]. In a development / design environment, cloud platforms provide dynamic and repeatable processes for creating environments that help reduce lead times and provide cost-effective optimizing infrastructure apart from eliminating manual intervention and minimizing rework due to environment defects. In a deployment environment, the cloud leverages virtualization, distributed applications and grid-based architecture patterns. In this article, I discuss creating a reference architecture and designing financial supply chain applications so they can be enabled for cloud environments [3].

Some of the challenges faced by the financial supply chain applications include lots of integrations, innovative automated voluminous payment solutions, purchasing and distribution of financial instruments/cards, electronic invoices present/payment systems, and performance metrics for financial flow management. From a buyer's perspective it's more about account payments and from a seller's perspective it's more about accounts receivable. The biggest challenge would be multi-party payments and reconciliation of the amounts. The volumes of the financial supply chain amounts are high, particularly during seasonal events. These additional volumes make it necessary for automated provisions for demand growth that can be achieved by implementing cloud-based solutions. Data and applications of financial supply chains make the difference when using a cloud-based design. Both user response system modules and batch processing system modules in the financial supply chain require the attention of cloud-based design in terms of creating more provisions for handling high volumes of web server/application server traffic, middleware to handle volumes and at the data tier. Most of the time, financial supply chain applications are connecting multiple applications at the same time rather than one application at a time, hence the scalability issues can be handled by incorporating cloud-based techniques.

Functional Drivers for Enabling Cloud in Financial Supply Chain Systems
While the business drivers for cloud are simplification, scalability, agility and efficiency, here we consider some of the functional drivers for enabling cloud services in financial supply china management systems. Some of the functions of these systems are seller point, retail outlets, trading desks, time of availability, payment systems support, gateways like SMS, mobile, payment, etc., and in all these parameters, time is one important factor as a buyer will walk away if the performance metrics are not within their expectations.

• Enabling Cloud as a Workstation Service
• Enabling Cloud as a Security Service
• Enabling Cloud as a Software Service
• Enabling Cloud as an Integration Service
• Enabling Cloud as a Platform Service
• Enabling Cloud as an Infrastructure Service

The design requirements for software services can be leveraged in the functionalities such as service desk, service requests, service reports or self-service portals.

The functionalities like analytics, key performance indicators, service business, workflows, business processes, and even database services are considered.

Infrastructure services are highly valuable in the case of the financial supply chain and can be leveraged in the following scenarios.

1. Virtualization of Service. The decoupling of business services by means of introducing virtualization as a design parameter is one parameter to be considered for cloud services. Virtualization of services ensures that application functionality is not directly tied to the underlying hardware such as servers, storage or networks. So, by means of introducing a design factor called virtualization of services, services are abstracted and dependencies are reduced on the infrastructure.
2. Flexibility to integrate multiple vendors. Enabling the business functionality as a service will create flexibility for services and this will help in scalability and abstracting the functionality from individual applications.
3. Infrastructure Expansion. Allocation/deallocation for scaling up or down based on a particular application or service functionality. For example, there is a demand to increase credit card payments only through merchant banking, then sufficient provisions should be made for them through cloud scalability
4. Cost-effective Opex from capital intensive Capex is one of the factors that can be considered when we move to cloud environment as the upfront cost is eliminated.
5. Factored deployment is considered for componentization as this will enhance the scalability of the applications

Security services are implemented as part of the identity and access management. Data protection functionalities and security intelligence particularly in payment gateways.

Design Parameters for Cloud Services in a Financial Supply Chain
Some of the critical design factors are flexible infrastructure, building abstracted and virtual services, service orchestration, and caching the data on a per-usage basis. Here we take the design considerations based on functionality.

1. Buyer performance: Design for multi-channel. Buyers can interact with multiple channels such as mobile, phone, call center, retail outlet or online. Some of the data that must be retrieved when a buyer approaches the seller are how frequently the buyer comes back, what are the interests of the buyer, and the financial position of the buyer. For all these, we need the history of the buyer as well current trends. The amalgamation of the data from business analytics and current trends will help. This requires a sufficient design pattern for caching the data and the manipulation of data. In the same way, when a seller is trying to procure data from various dealers, expectations are different and the same needs to be incorporated when designing the systems.
2. Quick addition of new products or functionalities: Systems should have agile patterns to roll out new products and functionalities. The best way to achieve this is through componentization and service enablement of core components so that new functionalities are created based on core services.
3. User experience: This has two faces. One is how good the user interface (both quality of the content and design) is and second, how quickly the data can be displayed. The first factor is more about developing software services and the second is utilizing Infrastructure as Service for caching data and restoring/retrieving data. Also make sure to have garbage collection and disk utilization factors for better performance of the user interface.
4. Security: Financial transactions are always critical and should be secured so security as service will enable security requirements including multi-factor authentication.
5. Scaling of user systems: Implement Work station as Service to enhance the number of systems available for users.
6. Common infrastructure: Identify the common functionalities and provide them with a common infrastructure for better coordination and implementation, for example, analytics, user data, and metrics.
7. Collaboration Services: Design apps for collaboration services like sharing the information on common utilities, common information, attractive provisions /offers, etc.
8. Load Spikes: Handle load differences using Infrastructure as a Service

Cloud Reference Architecture for Services of Financial Supply Chain Systems
The following diagram represents the reference architecture for enterprise services in financial supply chain systems.

As mentioned in the above reference architecture, it has two components; the left-side one is enterprise applications and right-side one is cloud-enabled enterprise services for extended applications. Cloud services layer has a security layer, Work station as a Service layer, Software as a Service layer, a service integration layer, middleware integration, and then an infrastructure services layer.

Conclusion
Financial supply chain management system demands are elastic in nature and depend on products, time and location. This variation will have an impact on applications that support financial supply chain systems in terms of the availability of products for each of the functionalities such as buyer/consumer, provider/front-facing seller, stores/distributors, manufacturers and then OEMS. A lot of these applications require a large number of integrations and enabling functionalities as services will reduce the dependency of the applications on one another and also to ensure the scalability of the applications.

References

1. http://gvb.sys-con.com/node/1673719
2. http://gvb.sys-con.com/node/1662935
3. msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee658110.aspx
4. http://events.sti2.at/mda4ServiceCloud2010/