Exploring the use of SWOT analysis in the adoption of Cloud Computing services for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

AuthorHadidi, Rassule
  1. INTRODUCTION

    Over the last several decades, businesses and consumers alike have seen an explosive growth of computing products and services available via the Internet and its infrastructure. These services are often reliably available and delivered on 24/7/365 basis. An example is email services offered to users by several providers. These services, in particular, are helpful to small and medium-sized enterprises that do not have a significant amount of resources and technical expertise to set up the appropriate infrastructure to be able to compete with their larger competitors.

    The term "Cloud Computing" has appeared on the radar screen of information systems/information technology and business professionals over the last few years. The term "Cloud" refers to the Internet and "Computing" refers to the use of technology. Cloud Computing integrates concepts from grid, utility, and distributed computing into several major services. Since around 2006, a range of Cloud Computing definitions have appeared in the literature. Hartig (2009) describes Cloud Computing as delivering services, applications, and data over the Internet. Fingar (2009) states that: "Cloud Computing is a massive distributed computing model consisting of three tiers: infrastructure, platform and services, and is about using swarms of computers to deliver unprecedented computing power to people and organizations across the globe." Vaquero et al., (2009) explain that "Clouds are a large pool of easily usable and accessible virtualized resources such as hardware, development platforms and/or services."

    The National Institute of Standards and Technology (www.nist.gov) classifies Cloud Computing into the categories of public, private, community, and hybrid services. With the public Cloud, an organization owns the computing and communications infrastructure and makes them available to users for a fee. Amazon.com, for example, makes its infrastructure available to other organizations to use for a fee. An advantage of the public Cloud is scalability. In contrast, the infrastructure in a private Cloud is only available to one organization. This organization may operate the Cloud or may outsource the operation to a third party. Cloud Computing services provided by Dataline (www.dataline.com) for the US Department of Defense is an example in this category. The private Cloud is also referred to as "Enterprise Cloud" or "Tactical Cloud," (Fingar, 2009). Better level of security is an advantage of the private compared with the public Cloud services.

    In the community type of Cloud Computing, the required infrastructure is shared by a number of organizations who have a common goal, a specific project, or a similar objective. The community Cloud may be managed by one of the organizations or by a third party. With the current discussions on the need for a national electronic medical record, for example, creating a health care related community Cloud for this purpose is a good example in this category. The infrastructure of a hybrid type of Cloud Computing consists of more than one Cloud that are integrated using appropriate technology for inter-operability. This kind of Cloud will be very useful in large organizations with state-of-the-art as well as legacy systems. The hybrid Cloud consists of both the public and private Cloud Computing environments.

    Wang et al., (2008) divide Cloud Computing services into three areas of Hardware-as-a-Service (HaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), and Data-as-a-Service (DaaS). Cellary and Strykowski (2009), Fingar (2009) classify Cloud Computing services into three major areas of: Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Iyer and Henderson (2010) identify two more types of Cloud Computing services: Collaboration Services and Consulting Services. Software as a Service provides access to various business software applications that are hosted at remote locations (Woloski, 2008). Businesses subscribe and pay for this service. An example of this service is the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform provided by Salesforce (www.salesforce.com). Google Maps and Google docs are other examples in this category.

    Platform and Infrastructure as a Service refers to renting of these facilities. In Platform as a Service, organizations such as Google or Salesforce provide users with a development environment for application development. In the case of Infrastructure as a Service, an organization such as Amazon, provides services such as computer processing and storage capabilities which a user has full control and can use it until (s)he terminates the service. The collaboration services consist of social networking applications that support collaboration. Examples of these kinds of services include Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Sonico, and Orkut. Cloud Computing service layer consists of companies that provide consulting and other related services about Cloud Computing. Examples of these kinds of Cloud Computing consulting services providers include Touchstone Group, and Booz Allen Hamilton.

    In the next section, we will review the business applications of Cloud Computing for SMEs. In section three, the potential...

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