Resource Management and User Registration in an eUtility

A service provider offering an eUtility faces a number of administrative challenges in deploying that service. We describe a research prototype that addresses two challenging areas in such a deployment. First, when a service provider offers an eUtility to enterprises with existing user bases, the process of registering those existing users, as well as the process of managing user registrations as people come and go in the enterprise, can be cumbersome and error-prone. Our system takes advantage of the enterprise's current user-management tools to ease user-registration management for the eUtility. Existing users can easily be signed up for the eUtility service on organizational boundaries, as the service is deployed in different parts of the enterprise. Then, as the eUtility is used to serve many customers, the provider will find itself coping with varying needs and expectations from the different customers. To avoid dedicating resources statically, it will need tools to monitor usage and to adjust resource allocations according to those measurements as compared with the service-level agreements for the different customers. Our prototype performs those monitor and control functions, allowing the service provider to make those allocation adjustments automatically.

By: Barry Leiba, Marion Blount, Wolfgang Segmuller

Published in: RC22972 in 2003

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