Knowledge Management Framework for Cloud Federation

Abstract

A cloud federation (CF) is an alliance of cloud service providers (CSPs) working together to overcome scalability and portability barriers. However, there are some business challenges (e.g., lack of trust, lack of schemes for revenue sharing, and lack of schemes for resource sharing) and technological challenges (e.g., missing schemes for resource provisioning, lack of coordinated resource management, and little load balancing), causing instability in CFs. As CF alliances pursue strategic goals, they require intensive knowledge sharing. In fact, practitioners have confirmed a positive impact of knowledge management on stability and success of strategic alliances (SA). According to the literature, SAs may also face learning issues such as non–controlled information revelation or unbalanced dissemination of core competencies. These findings pose challenges about the nature of the knowledge and how to share it within a CF. Nonetheless, there is only scarce literature on KM in CF. Thus, the purpose of the paper is to propose a KM framework for CFs with the aim of strengthening stability and potential CF commercialization.