Introduction
1
1
Introduction
1.1
Outline of the Problem
“
The cloud services companies of all sizes. The cloud is for everyone. The cloud is
a democracy.” Marc Benioff, 2010, CEO of Salesforce.com
Due to the high amount of data created by consumers and companies every day,
the vast development of market and constant progressing technology, a revision
process concerning data handling, storage, availability and reliability has started to
develop. Companies are faced with new challenges and called upon to abandon
traditional paradigms regarding information technology (Terplan & Voigt, 2011, p.
12) & (
Baun, Kunze, Nimis, & Tai, 2009, p. 12). This shift of paradigm manifests
itself in the provision of services through the Internet as one example to respond to
this change. Companies do not have to solely rely on their internal IT infrastructure
anymore. On-demand and subscription based models of cloud services give them
the freedom to choose from various services, which offer flexibility and elasticity.
High initial investments in servers, software and licensing models are replaced by
small recurring monthly expenses that can be adapted to the specific business
needs. Cloud services can also be a gate opener to new strategic insights gained
from Big Data. However any new technology bears certain risks and pitfalls. In the
context of cloud these are for example legal issues, security, autonomy of data or
the dependency from a third party provider.
1.2
Resulting Objectives
On the basis of the above portrayed situation, the implication is to culminate three
major objectives:
Originally, this research should grant a deeper insight into the topic of cloud
services, how their architecture is build up, possible span of corporate application in
terms of productivity enhancement, collaboration (in-house and in different
geographical regions), outsourcing of business relevant processes as well as
integration in companies’ ERP systems. The primary focus is to determine what
