Organizational implications of a comprehensive approach for cloud-storage sourcing

Abstract

Cloud-computing facilitates consumers to source online storage-services on a pay-as-you-go basis. The sourcing of storage-as-a-service (STaaS) requires a decision maker to contend with several elements such as pricing structure, application characteristics and quality-of-service requirements, in addition to tactical considerations such as risk propensity and supplier diversification. This makes STaaS sourcing a complex task. Discussion on STaaS sourcing models addressing these aspects and their utility to decision-makers is, however, scant. In this paper, we propose a two-stage holistic approach based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Goal programming (GP). We derive insights provided by these models from 10800 runs using market-based data. We also use an experiment to assess our hypothesis concerning the impact of task complexity on decision-quality. Both these experiments have implications for different business scenarios in the STaaS market, and for decision-making. We discuss these managerial implications, and present a prototype Decision Support System (DSS) to aid STaaS selection.

Risks and rewards of cloud computing in the UK public sector: A reflection on three Organisational case studies

“…It is an emerging paradigm of computing that allows for delivering information technology (IT) resources and services through a network, usually the Internet (Krishnaswamy and Sundarraj 2015;Bhattacherjee and Park 2014). Primarily, the cloud consists of the provision of information systems (IS) and the whole range of IT infrastructure, such as servers, file storage, email, telephones, personal computers and laptops, over the internet, instead of being hosted locally and on site by an organisation.…”