Presently, SMEs are finding it difficult to adopt cloud services for their businesses due to various service providers offering similar services. In addition, little work has been carried out in regards to the cloud services adoption process by SMEs. In this chapter, the authors propose CLOUDSME, a novel framework that aids in the adoption process of SaaS cloud services. Accordingly, they implement a decision support system, which includes an ontology of cloud services knowledge within the proposed framework. Analytical hierarchical process (AHP) is used to determine the weight of each cloud service attribute, and a benchmark is set to determine the acceptability of each cloud service based on its ability to meet the acceptable benchmark for each criteria. It can also help in a healthy competition to improve the quality of service among cloud service providers. The CLOUDSME semantic model will guide SME owners in answering user requirements towards decision making in the cloud service adoption process.
Top1. Introduction
Cloud computing in recent years is seen as one of the biggest breakthroughs in technology. A large number of cloud service providers exist with each prioritising on various aspects of cloud services data storage, file sharing, CRM, web hosting, programming framework environment, Data centres etc. To remain competitive in cloud technology offerings, these service providers have made an effort towards easy accessibility to their services, which are known to offer tremendous benefits such as reduction in operational cost and eradication of upfront investment for businesses. However, despite this promising technology SMEs are still very slow towards adopting cloud services and this could be due to the growing number of growing number of service providers, Lack of knowledge of cloud services, security issues in the cloud, reliability, interoperability, lack of decision support tools and frameworks(Jagannathan, 2012; Aljabre, 2012 & Ashwini et al, 2012).
The continuous research towards finding a solution to the slow adoption rate of ICT especially cloud computing is the key motivation to this paper. For example in (Verizon, 2009) survey on ICT adoption by small businesses, in its findings reported that 39% of small businesses implemented technology to advertise and promote their business compared to 9% who adopted technology for their business process. Against the above background, the SME owners/ managers who are also willing to adopt this technology are faced with the challenge of selecting service delivery models such as private, public and hybrid clouds (Jagannathan, 2012). At the moment, Potential adopters either go on service provider websites or blogs to manually read about what cloud offerings, price per usage as well as what SLAs are available. This complex approach towards retrieving cloud service knowledge is considered as a barrier to cloud service adoption particularly for SMEs with limited knowledge and experience on services provided.
Generally, cloud services are divided into three layers (Buyya et al, 2009): Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).The top layer focus on application services (SaaS) which is usually the cloud interface that allows computer users have access using a web browser and thin computer terminals. The SaaS and PaaS layers, which are, also known as application and software environment layer are built upon the lower layer which is the IaaS layer. The upper layers are mostly developed and provided by a third party service provider while the service suppliers of the IaaS are different as they focus more on the data centre (Fortis et al, 2012). Depending on the needs of an organisation, SaaS services are adopted based on service application requirements, an example is the (CRM) Customer Relationship Management application provided by Salesforce (Cusumano, 2010). PaaS offers a platform for adoption in instances where a business is interested in the development of other applications on top of it, an example is Google App Engine (Ciurana, 2009). While IaaS is adopted as an environment for the deployment, running and management of virtual machines and storages. Finally, it is the IaaS layer that offers on-demand storage in terms of incremental scalability of computer resources (Buyya et al, 2009).
Furthermore, public cloud offerings makes it more difficult in terms of decision making by SME owners who are trying to determine which cloud services fulfil their business requirements. Most cloud service providers offer similar services in different packages, such as pricing, file size restriction and storage, security, operating systems supported, interoperability, fault tolerance, load balancing, programing framework, SLA,. While one service is better on one feature it might not be on another or even more expensive for the same service. Finding the convenient cloud service that satisfies user requirements giving the diversity of cloud service offerings has become a significant challenge especially to SMEs (Wu et al, 2012). It is important that SME managers who want to adopt cloud services are able to evaluate which cloud service is most suitable for their business based on certain criteria and also the ability to choose a cloud service in real time.