ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to investigate the new business advantages of a futuristic worldwide Intercloud ecosystem, considering evolution degree of the current infrastructures and the possible scenarios on which the Intercloud federation model could be applied. It introduces the general meaning of the term federation, focuses specifically on its implications in the cloud, and presents a terminology useful for classifying the status of evolution of clouds as far as regards the federation. The chapter presents some details about the technological solutions that could be employed for implementing the aforementioned three-phase approach. The concept of Intercloud implies several more evolved and complex scenarios than the current ones where clouds are independent and isolated from each other, or where they merely use the services provided by other clouds. The trend of the cloud computing ecosystem has been characterized by the steady rising of hundreds of independent, heterogeneous cloud providers, managed by private subjects, yielding various types of cloud-based services to their clients.
