Cloud Computing Deployment and Selection Criteria for Organizations

Introduction

According to the National Institute of Information Technology:

In contrast to the public belief, cloud computing is not something new and introduced just in the past decade (Sammut, 2010). This service; which takes its name from the symbol used frequently to represent Internet in network diagrams (Chee, & Franklin, 2010); goes back to the time when mainframes were used for computing. At that time, companies rented mainframes for a specified amount of time and executed their programs and produced results in that limited time (Stallings, 2005). Consequently, an initial version of what we consider cloud computing now was implemented by mainframes. With the advent of personal computers, computing began to be done on cheap, fast and small devices with relatively large storage capacity making companies and individuals to do their computing on on-premises devices rather than cloud. However, networks, the Internet and the introduction of Software-as-a-Service in the early 2000s contributed to moving back to cloud computing. IT businesses began to offer services in terms of software, hardware and storage on a pay-per-use basis (Sammut, 2010). These companies claimed to include scalability, reliability and lower cost in their provided solutions. As a result, a large number of organizations requiring an IT-infrastructure for their business tried to make an entry into it (Bhadauria, Chaki, Chaki, & Sanyal, 2011). According to a survey conducted by Microsoft in 2011, 72% of 1979 IT professionals under study were in the stage of using, implementing, trying, or discussing cloud computing in their organization. Only 28% of this population had no plan about utilizing cloud computing (Cloud Power, 2011). All the same, since “cloud computing is heavily promoted by technology advancement and is so high resource dependent that researches in academic institutions have not had many opportunities to analyze and experiment with It” (Andrei, 2009), this technology is still in its initial stage in terms of implementation and usage. Moreover, recently, we are witnessing some cloud service outages at famous cloud service providers such as Amazon, Google and Twitter (Perdue, 2011). Also, a wide range of papers are being published by many IT magazines casting doubt on the efficiency of cloud computing (Beckham, 2011; Curtis, 2012; Newhall, 2013). As a consequence, many other companies prefer to have their own datacenters due to lack of trust to the reliability, security, cost-efficiency and many other aspects of cloud computing. Our goal in this paper is to analyze and evaluate various issues revolving around cloud computing in order to help organizations gain a deep insight in to the beauties and the challenges around cloud computing and realize whether cloud computing or enterprise datacenters are suitable for their case.