Implementation of User-End Broker Policy to Improve the Reliability of Cloud Services

1. Introduction

Cloud computing is a new style of computing, where flexible and scalable information technology (IT) related capabilities are provided as a services (Lin, Fu, Zhu, & Dasmalchi, 2009). Cloud computing deals with how IT is provisioned instead of only improvement of data centers (Creeger, 2009). It is a shift from currently used desktop to laptops and smart devices etc. which have become indispensable (Chien, Calder, Elhert & Bhatia, 2003). The economic appeal of cloud computing is often mentioned as converting capital expense (Capex) to operating expenses (Opex) (Armbrust et al., 2009). Cloud services can offer the traditional IT services with significant cost advantage (Lin et al. 2009; Pallis et al. 2010). Users can access the IT resources from anywhere and anytime using multiple devices such as computers, smart phones, tablets and laptops etc. (Park & Ryoo, 2012).

Even though cloud computing has many benefits, still it has not matured enough to cater the needs of various category of users. Therefore, enterprises are considering the benefits and other impact before adoption (Khajeh, Greenwood, & Sommerville, 2010). Experts believe that to get the full adoptions of cloud paradigm approximately 10 to 15 years are needed (Sullman, 2009). Even though cloud computing has been adopted by a number of enterprises, yet cloud paradigm has not yet reached to threshold of its maturity (CSA & ISACA, 2012). Same is evident from the recent outages, which has been witnessed in many of the prominent cloud providers. Some of the prominent cloud outages and their cloud providers have been depicted in Table 1(source: http:iwgcr.org/).