Review of factors that influence cloud computing adoption
Shailja Tripathi and Nasina Jigeesh,
Faculty of Operations & Systems, IFHE University, IFHE,Hyderabad
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Abstract
Today the technology continues to play an important role in helping organizations maintain control and take advantage of opportunities in today’s highly competitive, increasingly complex business environment. Cloud computing provides software, storage, computing power and other services to customers from remote data centers over the Web. Demand for cloud-based software is rising rapidly which allows companies to start using new programs faster and at lower cost than traditional products that are installed at a customer's own data center. Cloud computing companies offer cloud computing in developing countries like India, China at prices everyone can afford, so now it is not just top IT companies in developed nations that can take advantage of the cloud but cloud computing providers have now given this ability to smaller companies too in developing nations like India, China etc. This paper reviews different issues influencing the adoption of cloud computing and attempts to derive a framework for successful adoption of cloud computing in organizations. It covers various issues related to resources, security, interoperability and agility.
Keywords : Cloud computing, Cloud contributing factors, Information Technology, Computing.
Introduction
In 1990 Cloud computing was known as ASP. Then in 2001, SaaS was introduced as a term for on-demand computing – this was rebirth of ASP. In1999 the salesforce which was one of the first movers in cloud computing, introduced the concept of delivering enterprise applications via a simple website. Amazon was next on the bandwagon, launching Amazon Web Service in 2002. Then Google Docs introduced in 2006 which brought cloud computing to the forefront of public awareness. Amazon’s Elastic Compute cloud (EC2) as a commercial web service was introduced in 2006 which allowed small companies and individuals to rent computers on which to run their own computer applications. In 2007 an industry-wide collaboration between Google, IBM and a number of universities across the United States. Next in 2008 Eucalyptus introduced the first open source AWS API compatible platform for deploying private clouds, followed by Open Nebula, the first open source software for deploying private and hybrid clouds. In 2009 Microsoft enter into cloud computing with the launch of Windows Azure. Since then many major players enter into cloud computing gradually.
Cloud combines many of the benefits of utility computing such as self-provision and auto scaling with the CPU processing power of both supercomputing and cluster computing which helps to compute large scale demands by sharing the load. In Addition to grid computing – with its metered utility service ,the idea of pay-per-use was born. It is these types of computing within the data centre model that have allowed the evolution of idea of cloud computing.Cloud Computing become a choice for businesses when it is coupled with the benefits of shared resources, along with success of server virtualization.Since companies save capex by using the cloud, the money can be ploughed back into their core business
Indian cloud service providers such as TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Mahindra Satyam & HCL are converting the cloud threat into an opportunity by building new strategies. The study of InformationWeek (March, 2012) found that today, less than 5 percent of Indian service providers’ revenues come from cloud, but by 2015 this is expected to increase to 10-15 percent[9]. According to Asia's first "Cloud Readiness Index," prepared and published by the Asia Cloud Computing Association China is set to transfer £98 billion (US$154 billion) to develop cloud computing hubs [14].
Major cloud service providers include Google, Microsoft, Citrix cloud, Amazon EC2,Salesforce etc. Google Cloud is of Google which provide enterprise solutions to companies. Google Cloud Platform allows building applications and websites, store and analyzing data on Google’s infrastructure. Microsoft offers Private Cloud – which provides end to end service management and delivers best computing solutions for business. Other one is Public Cloud – Windows Azure is the tool which provides unmatched flexibility and scalability to the business and it is much ease-of-use. Amazon Web Services provides a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands of businesses in 190 countries around the world. Rackspace is an open cloud company which delivers enterprise-level hosting services to businesses of all sizes and kinds around the world since 1998. Salesforce is an enterprise cloud computing company that provides business software on a subscription basis. The company is best known for its on-demand Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions.
According to a paper by research firm IDC, jobs will be created across functional areas such as marketing, sales, finance and administration, production and service. Increased IT spending is one of the reason that BRICs not spend on cloud computing as violently as several other countries in the world. China leads the BRIC group by spending 5.2% of its GDP on IT, followed by Russia and Brazil with 4.7%, and India with 4.0%.In comparison other countries like US spending 7.3% of its GDP, South Korea with 8.0%, Bangladesh with 9.7%, and Malaysia with 11.7%. This showed that the BRIC cloud computing still has to improve growth concerning IT spending relative to GDP [6].
The expected cloud computing market growth rate (CAGR) of BRIC countries by 2015 was found that India has a CAGR of 54.5% with China on the top (77.5%) followed by Brazil (72%) and with Russia on the bottom (50%) [6]. The study of International Data Corporation [IDC, 2013] forecasted the compound annual growth of employment in cloud computing between 2011 and 2015 in various sectors, namely, Banking, Communication/Media, Discrete and Process manufacturing, Education, Government, Healthcare, Insurance, Resource industries, and Retail. The report says the foundation for job growth is that IT innovation which allows for business innovation which leads to business revenues and this leads to job creation. According to the IDC study, more than 50 per cent of the 14 million jobs would be generated in the small and medium businesses. More than two million jobs each will be generated in the ‘communications and media’ and manufacturing sectors, followed by banking at over 1.4 million [6]. Cloud computing creates a gripping opportunity for businesses and governments around the world. Gartner report (2013) predicted the highest cloud spending for the coming years in the industries of transportation, insurance, banking and securities, communications, media and services (CM&S) and manufacturing.
Cloud Computing is a technology that uses the internet and central remote servers to maintain data and applications. It allows consumers and businesses to use applications without installation and access their personal files at any computer with internet access. It allows for much more professional computing by providing centralized data storage, high processing and data transfer rate. Yahoo email, Gmail, or Hotmail etc are simple example of cloud computing. The server and email management software is all on the cloud (internet) and is totally managed by the cloud service provider Yahoo, Google etc. The software is used and enjoyed by the customer and get benefits of the technology. Application, Storage and Connectivity are the three segments of Cloud Computing. Each segment provides a different purpose and present different products for businesses and individuals around the world.
Characteristics and Service models of Cloud computing
On-demand self service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity and precise service are the different characteristics of cloud computing On-demand self service refers to the service provided by cloud computing vendors to the customer online that enables the prerequisite of cloud resources on demand whenever they are required. On-demand self service resource sourcing is a key feature of most cloud offerings where the user can balance the required infrastructure up to a significant level without disrupting the host operations. In Cloud Computing the customers share from a pool of computing resources (resources (e.g. networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) in remote data centres. The customer is billed only for the amount of resources used under a subscription-based billing method.
Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) are the three service models of Cloud Computing.SaaS provides network-based access to commercially available software or pre-made application which leads to increased speed of software deployment, faster user adoption of software, less support requirements, and ease in implementation and upgrades.In PaaS the developers to get opportunity to build and deploy web applications on a hosted infrastructure and leverage the infinite compute resources of a cloud infrastructure. In PaaS, an operating system, hardware, and network are provided, and the customer installs or develops its own software and applications. The IaaS model provides the hardware and network and integrates basic services such as virtual/web servers, data storage, and databases into one platform for deploying and running the applications.Figure 1 gives a detailed picture of linking the different parts of cloud computing together.
Figure 1. Cloud computing architecture
Deployment of cloud services:
Public cloud, Private cloud, Hybrid cloud and Community cloud, public are the types of Cloud Services available today which can be subscribe depending on needs of the customer. A public cloud can be accessed by any subscriber with an internet connection and access to the cloud space and is a cost-effective way to deploy IT solutions, especially for small or medium sized businesses. Google Apps is a well-known example of a public cloud that is used by many organizations of all sizes. Other examples of public clouds are Microsoft Windows Azure,IBM Smart Cloud, Amazon EC2 etc.A private cloud is established for a specific group or organization and limits access to just that group. So it provides greater control over the cloud infrastructure, and are often suitable for larger installations. The examples of private clouds are Eucalyptus, Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud - UEC (powered by Eucalyptus),Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud),VMware Cloud Infrastructure Suite ,Microsoft ECI data center etc.In a community cloud, the service is shared by several organizations and made available only to those groups that have similar cloud requirements. Examples of community clouds are Google Apps for Government, Microsoft Government Community Cloud, etc. A hybrid cloud is essentially a combination of at least two clouds, where the clouds included are a mixture of public, private, or community which enables cloud bursting for load-balancing between clouds. Examples of Hybrid Cloud are Windows Azure ,VMware VCloud, etc.
Factors that influence cloud computing adoption
According to The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, 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.
According to Data Centre Industry survey in 2012, security play as a vital influencing factor in cloud computing adoption followed by compliance/regulatory issues,cost,internal cloud computing management expertise and reliability concerns. In addition absence of credible case studies, vendor lock-in and absence of cloud services meeting current compute demands are also the influencing factors of cloud computing adoption [17].
Park and Ryoo [13] empirically examine the switching behavior from traditional IT to cloud services at the individual level also explore the switching factors (i.e. switching enablers and switching inhibitors) and empirically examine the relationships between switching factors and users’ intention to switch to cloud services, based on the two-factor theoretic perspective. This study uses a longitudinal design to get survey data from undergraduate students at two universities in Korea in the context of IT switching to Google Apps settings. This study found that users’ switching intention to cloud services was not only positively influenced by expected switching benefits whose antecedents are omnipresence of cloud services and collaboration support, but also negatively influenced by expected switching costs whose antecedents are satisfaction with incumbent IT and breadth use of incumbent IT. The impacts of switching benefits and costs on switching intention were also positively moderated by end users’ personal innovativeness.
Xicheng et al [19] introduced the concept of an Internet-based Virtual Computing Environment (iVCE), which aims to provide Cloud services by a dynamic combination of data centers and other multi-scale computing resources on the Internet. Also present a model that addresses two critical challenges in iVCE: multiscale resource aggregation and elastic binding. Then describe the design and implementation of iVCE software platform that embodies the model. Comprehensive experiments show that iVCE provides a novel, promising way to deal with scalability and utility, thereby enabling economical and elastic Cloud Computing.
Angela and Nan-Chou [2] used a survey by interview approach to understand IT professionals’ understandings and concerns about cloud computing in Taiwan. He suggest that while the benefits of cloud computing such as its computational power and ability to help companies save costs are often mentioned in the literature, the primary concerns that IT managers and software engineers have are compatibility of the cloud with companies’ policy, IS development environment, and business needs; and relative advantages of adopting cloud solutions. Their findings also suggest that most IT companies in Taiwan will not adopt cloud computing until the uncertainties associated with cloud computing, e.g. security and standardization are reduced and successful business models have emerged.
Dhar [7] compared global IT outsourcing with Cloud computing along with the evolution of traditional IT services.the finding of his study reveals that cloud computing has created new opportunities for IT services providers and the outsourcing vendors will have to modify their strategy to take advantage of this new computing paradigm.This study also reveals that the Cloud service providers should be aware that security is a great concern for most organizations. Data protection and privacy issues are holding back wide scale adoption of Cloud computing in the enterprise.
Srinivasan [15] proposed a mechanism for managing security in a cloud computing environment using the ISO/IEC 27002 framework (The ISO/IEC 27002 security standard is based on a management systems approach). The ISO framework includes the three categories: organizational infrastructure (Organizational Security,Asset Classification and Control,Information Security Policy),technical infrastructure (access control, Systems Development and Maintenance, Communications and Operations Management, Physical and Environmental Security) and information protection (Human Resources Security, Business Continuity Management,compliance,Risk Management).