Content area
Full text
Introduction
Cloud computing can be viewed as a way to deliver IT enabled services in the form of software, platform and infrastructure using internet technologies. Cloud computing is defined by NIST, 2009 as “Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g. networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.” The major driver for this widespread adoption is the economic benefit that cuts expenses for existing applications (Sandhu et al., 2010). The emergence of the cloud computing concept has changed the way IT services are developed, deployed, used, maintained, and paid for (Marston et al., 2011). It is significant for its service-oriented architecture, virtualization, utility and autonomic computing (Subashini and Kavitha, 2011; Benlian and Hess, 2011; Misra and Mondal, 2011). While a lot of research is currently taking place in the technology itself, an increased number of studies are witnessed to address business-related issues of cloud computing (Marston et al., 2011). Some studies focus on the opportunities and risks of adopting cloud computing but without going into details to importance and effectiveness of adoption factors, their affect on customer decision and response to these factors, and how companies try to handle these issues (Benlian and Hess, 2011).
Cloud computing has three different service models: Infrastructure-as-a-System (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). IaaS is known as the basic level of cloud services which delivers infrastructure services to customers over a network (e.g. internet) such as hardware (e.g. storage and network) and software (e.g. operating systems and virtualization technologies). In this, users have control over operating systems, storage, and deployed applications (Mell and Grance, 2011). Examples of IaaS include Amazon’s Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud and Secure Storage Service. PaaS is known as second level of cloud computing which offers online access to all the resources that are required to build an application. The services include application design, development, testing, deployment, and hosting tools which offer access to programming languages and libraries, etc. (Velte et al., 2009). It facilitated users...