A Survey of Cloud Workflow
Hua Huang, Yilai Zhang, Min Zhang · Advanced materials research · 2013
Traditionally, enterprises have approached IT modernization and back office process enhancement in silos, by introducing multiple vendors with different technologies, platforms and operating systems, which limits process integrity and leads to disseminated responsibilities. In contrast, the Cloud revolution has made it much easier for enterprises to approach business transformation in a holistic manner, leading to a quantum leap in their business and IT practices and performance. In other words, Cloud-based workflow (which is shorted for cloud workflow) technology is now regarded as a pretty good solution: Cloud workflow helps organizations in process harmonization, optimal organization design and change management offering benefits beyond cost reduction, it enables a complex application instance to be abstractly defined, flexibly configured and auto-operated. This paper introduces shortly the technology of both cloud computing and workflow and then presents the concepts and features of cloud workflow. Meanwhile, the following part discusses the application scenario and the application cases of cloud workflow. Lastly a possible trend of workflow in the future is proposed.