Drivers of Cloud Computing Adoption for E-Government Services Implementation

Cloud Computing

The term of cloud computing is a relatively new and it is defined by the IEEE Computer Society as: “A paradigm in which information is constantly stored in servers on the Internet and cached temporarily on clients that include desktops, entertainment centers, computers, notebooks, handhelds, etc.”. According to Foster et al. (2008) the cloud can be defined as a large scale distributed computing paradigm where a pool of virtualized, scalable, and manageable storage, computing power, platforms and services can be provisioned on-demand to customers via the Internet. Cloud computing is a collection of virtualized and scalable resources, which can host applications and provide required services to the users and can be charged as per the use like utility (Pokharel and Park, 2009). According to Mell and Grance (2011) the widely accepted definition of cloud computing is the US National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) definition which states that cloud computing is a model for providing ubiquitous, adequate and on-demand access to a shared and configurable computing resources (e.g. servers, networks, storage, applications and services) with minimal effort and service provider interaction (Mell and Grance, 2009).