Cloud providers viability

Abstract

A major part of the commercial Internet is moving toward the cloud paradigm. This phenomenon has a drastic impact on the organizational structures of enterprizes and introduces new challenges that must be properly addressed to avoid major setbacks. One such challenge is that of cloud provider viability, that is, the reasonable certainty that the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) will not go out of business, either by filing for bankruptcy or by simply shutting down operations, thus leaving its customers stranded without an infrastructure and, depending on the type of cloud service used, even without their applications or data. This article attempts to address the issue of cloud provider viability, defining a possible way of modeling viability as a non-functional requirement and proposing some approaches that can be used to mitigate the problem, both from a technical and from a legal perspective. By introducing a structured perspective into the topic of cloud viability, describing the risks, factors and possible mitigators, the contribution of this work is twofold: it gives the customer a better understanding to determine when it can rely on the cloud infrastructure on the long term and what precautions it should take in any case, and provides the CSP with means to address some of the viability issues and thus increase its customers' trust.

An Assessment of the Risk of Service Supplier Bankruptcies as a Cybersecurity Threat

“…Given the potential risk, what can customers do to protect themselves from the risk of cloud service provider insolvencies? Users would be wise to consider the potential long-term viability of cloud service providers before entering into a contract with them [11], in particular if the provider will be storing or processing data, or supplying access to important software. Large market players in the cloud service industry may offer greater prospects of longevity of supply but fewer prospects of a bespoke service.…”

Performance of integrated workload scheduling and pre-fetching in multimedia mobile cloud computing

“…The cloud provides services such as software, platform, infrastructure and these services are maintained by cloud providers (e.g., AWS, Google cloud platform, Microsoft azure etc.) [1,2]. The cloud technologies help service providers to provide faster and more secure computing services to users.…”

“…Since cellular devices (e.g., smart phones, tablets etc.) face some limitations such as power, memory and computing power, the cloud providers offer services such as scalable and reconfigurable computing, storage and network services [1,2]. Moreover, the cloud computing is a technology with growing popularity for many organizations.…”