Requirements for the Summary-Reflection Paper:
For each reading article, you are responsible for writing a summary-reflection essay this essay should reflect your reflections of the concepts and theoretical frameworks discussed and the confusions you may have.Rather than simply repeat or even copy/paste from original reading materials, please focus on your understanding of the concepts and theoretical frameworks. To be more specific, besides a brief summary, you should have a major section dedicated to the confusions you have with the concepts and models in the reading materials. You should comment on those concepts and models with your own opinions based on working experiences, readings from the library, and reflections of your previous learning.
If you just repeat abstract concepts from the reading materials, you will not earn a high score. You should connect concepts with job/internship experiences.
A critical review of cloud computing: researching desires and realities Research article A critical review of cloud computing: researching desires and realities Will Venters, Edgar A Whitley Information Systems and Innovation Group, Department of Management, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK Correspondence: W Venters, Information Systems and Innovation Group, Department of Management, London School of Economics and Political Science, London WC2A 2AE, UK. Tel: þ 44 (0)2078523619; Fax: þ 44 (0)2079557385; E-mail: w.venters@lse.ac.uk Abstract Cloud computing has become central to current discussions about corporate information technology. To assess the impact that cloud may have on enterprises, it is important to evaluate the claims made in the existing literature and critically review these claims against empirical evidence from the field. To this end, this paper provides a framework within which to locate existing and future research on cloud computing. This framework is structured around a series of technological and service ‘desires’, that is, characteristics of cloud that are important for cloud users. The existing literature on cloud computing is located within this framework and is supplemented with empirical evidence from interviews with cloud providers and cloud users that were undertaken between 2010 and 2012. The paper identifies a range of research questions that arise from the analysis. Journal of Information Technology (2012) 27, 179–197. doi:10.1057/jit.2012.17; published online 14 August 2012 Keywords: cloud computing; services; latency; hybrid clouds; scalability; security Introduction C loud computing has emerged as a potentially dis- ruptive convergence of developments in computing power, data transmission speeds and the use of internet and mobile communications (Castells, 2001). At its most basic, it is a form of outsourced shared-resource computing (Babcock, 2010; Durkee, 2010) in which computing is pooled in large external data-centres and accessed by a range of customers through the internet. Since its emergence around 2007 (Baker, 2007; Lohr, 2007) the topic has exploded in interest within academic and technical literatures ranging from the presentation of technological details associated with the provision of cloud services through to opinion pieces about the potentially revolutionary impact of cloud computing as ‘a new paradigm’ of computing (Carr, 2008; Zhang et al., 2010). It is difficult to fully make sense of this diverse set of publications. This paper contributes to the understanding of cloud computing by providing a review of cloud computing theory and practice. The paper empirically grounds this review by evaluating the claims and trends identified in the literature through comparison with the experiences of cloud vendors and users identified in over 30 interviews undertaken between 2010 and 2012. This enhances the existing reviews of cloud found within the information systems literature (e.g. Iyer and Henderson, 2010; Saya et al., 2010; Behrend et al., 2011; Janssen and Joha, 2011). The paper further identifies research questions within this framework for information systems scholars. In this paper, cloud computing is understood in terms of the evolution of two distinct strands that come together to provide cloud computing. The first strand emerges from technological innovations such as virtualisation, high per- formance networks and data-centre automation (Boss et al., 2007; Armbrust et al., 2010). The second strand emerges from a more distinct emphasis on service-based perspec- tives (Vouk, 2008; Etro, 2009), which shifts attention from the management of technology assets to consideration of customer value from the use of technology services (Grönroos, 2011). The review is structured around a framework of ‘desires’ for cloud computing: characteristics of cloud that are desired by cloud users (Table 1); see also Willcocks et al. (2011b). In keeping with the two strands above, cloud is seen to encompass technological desires and service desires. The next section provides background and a working definition of cloud computing. This is followed by an Journal of Information Technology (2012), 27, 179–197 & 2012 JIT Palgrave Macmillan All rights reserved 0268-3962/12 palgrave-journals.com/jit/ overview of the framework of desires and the empirical evidence used in the paper. The paper then presents the technological and the service dimensions of cloud comput- ing desires. The paper ends by discussing the consequences of the analysis presented including a review of a series of further areas for research. Understanding cloud computing The importance of cloud computing Hyperbole surrounds many IT innovations but cloud com- puting in particular is being taken seriously by the IT industry and by IT purchasers. Steve Ballmer (CEO of Microsoft) suggests cloud represents a $3.3 trillion ‘transfor- mation that’s going on in the computing world’ (Ballmer, 2010b) and that Microsoft are ‘betting the company’ on cloud (Ballmer, 2010a). A recent IBM survey suggested 90% of business and technology leaders expect to have implemented some cloud computing by 2015, with 40% expecting a substantial implementation (Berman et al., 2012). Another survey (Brousell, 2011) argues that most Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are evaluating cloud options as alternatives to traditional IT approaches. A 2010 survey conducted by Horses for Sources found that two-thirds of business and IT executives view cloud as an enabler for services delivery models that drive innovation in their organisations and key decision makers looking to devote 30% of their IT budgets to cloud services over a 5-year time-frame (HorsesForSources, 2010; Willcocks et al., 2011b). Such growth is also reflected in the market for public cloud services, which Morgan Stanley suggests will face 50% compound annual growth (Holt et al., 2011). As early as 2010, Amazon’s revenue from cloud was estimated at between $500 million and $700 million (The Economist, 2010). Forrester forecasted a global market for cloud com- puting of $61 billion for 2012 (Kirsker, 2012) and believe this will grow to $241 billion by 2020 (Dignan, 2011). Such benefits are not restricted to the private sector; UK government aims to save d1.4 billion over the next 4 years, in part by launching its own cloud service (Maude, 2011). Currently the cloud computing marketplace is dominated by a few high profile companies (Brodkin, 2009). In the provision of raw computing and storage these include Amazon, Rackspace, 3Tera, EMC and AT&T, in providing software applications Google, Salesforce, Netsuite, Apple, SAP and Microsoft. Companies providing services for cloud providers include VMWare, Cisco, Akamai and Rightscale. Finally, there are large numbers of systems integrators and consultancies helping companies exploit cloud opportu- nities including Accenture, CA-technologies, Deloitte and IBM. The technological origins of cloud computing The idea of providing computing as a service through networks dates back to the 1960s (Kleinrock, 2005; Cafaro and Aloisio, 2011) when the provision of ‘computing utilities’ became a driving force behind the early devel- opment of the internet (Berman and Hey, 2004). Dis- tributing IT infrastructure and connecting to it via a network emerged during the 1980s (Owens, 2009; Durkee, 2010), with ‘Application Service Provision’ (ASP). Exam- ples of ASP include email services like Hotmail that emerged in the 1990s as a means to outsource applications as a service (Owens, 2009). Relatively short-lived perspec- tives like NetSourcing (Kern et al., 2002a; Kern et al., 2006) emphasised this process of outsourcing applications over the internet. In practice, it was the ‘dot-com boom’ which began an explosion of interest in outsourcing applications as both networks and internet software matured. Early ASPs failed due to insufficient bandwidth and computing power (Kern et al., 2002b; Susarla et al., 2003); however, the dot-com boom resulted in a large increase in global fibre-optic networking dramatically reducing latency and costs (Hogendorn, 2011). Improvement in networking was coupled with the emer- gence of a means of coordinating the ‘on-demand’ provi- sion of large scale of computing resources, achieved by drawing on innovations around ‘grid computing’ (Foster and Kesselman, 2004b; Foster et al., 2008), ‘utility comput- ing’ (Bunker and Thomson, 2006) and virtualisation on commodity hardware1 (Killalea, 2008; Stanoevska-Slabeva and Wozniak, 2010). At the same time, extremely large data-centres of commodity hardware began to be developed by companies such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft. This industrialisa- tion of IT infrastructures and the transfer of computing activity from individual PCs and private data-centres to Table 1 An outline of the cloud desires framework The technological dimension of cloud desire Equivalence The desire to receive a technical service which is at least equivalent (in terms of security, latency and availability) to that experienced when using a locally running traditional IT systems. Variety The desire to receive a service which provides variety corresponding with the use for which the service will be put. Abstraction The desire to receive technical services which abstract away unnecessary complexity for the service they provide. Scalability The desire to receive a service which is scalable to meet demand. The service dimension of cloud desire Efficiency The desire to receive a service that helps users be more efficient economically. Creativity The desire to receive a service which aids innovation and creativity. Simplicity The desire to receive a service which is simple to understand and use. A critical review of cloud computing W Venters and EA Whitley 180 large external public data-centres accessible over the internet became known as cloud computing (Boss et al., 2007; Da Rold, 2009). This shift ‘to the cloud’ (Carr, 2008) is perhaps more accurately described as a move to computing being provided by large pools of automated scalable com- puting resources (Cafaro and Aloisio, 2011) and associated applications (Cusumano, 2010). Definitions of cloud computing The move to scalable data-centres allowed computing resources to be purchased (or, perhaps more accurately rented) on-demand and in a scalable manner via the internet. Around 2007 the term cloud computing began to be used to reflect the use of the internet (usually repre- sented figuratively as a ‘cloud’ in diagrams) to connect to such services (Regalado, 2011). This focus on the internet and scalable external data- centres is reflected in the most widely adopted technical definition of cloud computing from the US National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST): ‘Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, appli- cations and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service pro- vider interaction’ (Mell and Grance, 2011). This definition focuses on the cloud as a platform for running applications and while this is an important element, it downplays the role of applications that run on these platforms. Alternative definitions, such as those provided by Boss et al. (2007), emphasise both platforms and the types of application that run on them. For them the platform ‘dynamically provisions, configures, reconfigures and de-provisions servers as needed’, allowing applications to scale through their hosting in large data-centres. Applications are ‘extended’ to be accessible through the internet, thus using the large data-centres and powerful servers to host them. Under Boss et al.’s (2007) definition anyone can access such applications via an internet connection – highlighting the significance of the access device such as PCs and laptops (Cubitt