Authors:
Till Haselmann
and
Gottfried Vossen
Affiliation:
University of Münster, Germany
Keyword(s):
Cloud Intermediaries, Cloud Services, IT-Outsourcing.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Cloud Computing
;
Cloud Risk, Challenges, and Governance
;
Cloudsourcing
;
Fundamentals
;
Platforms and Applications
Abstract:
Whilst “the cloud” is pervasively advertised as a silver bullet for many IT-related challenges of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) because it can potentially lead to many attractive benefits, many SMEs refrain from using cloud services because of high upfront costs for building the appropriate knowledge in the enterprise, for searching and screening of possible cloud service providers (CSPs), and for mastering the intricate legal issues related to outsourcing sensitive data. In this paper, we present hybrid cloud intermediaries, a concept that can address many of the prevailing issues. We describe the concept in detail and show conceivable variants, including a comprehensive cross-perspective consolidated model of cloud intermediary value-creation. Subsequently, we analyze the benefits of such a hybrid cloud intermediary for SMEs and suggest suitable governance structures based on the cooperative paradigm. The resulting entity is concisely called a coop cloud.