Palgrave are offering the article for free:

“A critical review of cloud computing: researching desires and realities”

Will Venters and Edgar A Whitley

J Inf Technol 27: 179-197; advance online publication, August 14, 2012; doi:10.1057/jit.2012.17

http://www.palgrave-journals.com/jit/journal/v27/n3/index.html

I’ll be presenting on cloud computing at the GovNet efficient ICT 2012 conference on Thursday:

http://www.efficient-ict-conference.co.uk/

Drop me a line if you are attending and would like to catch up. 

Within Software Engineering Ian Sommerville’s work is well known (and his text book a staple). As such his views on how to teach Cloud within a software engineering course are useful. The following paper outlines his views and, though it is rather lacking in detail, discusses the topics and perspectives he thinks are important, namely:

• Map-reduce paradigm for independent computation (Hadoop)
• Schema-free databases and their uses
• Service-oriented computing
• Multi-tenancy
• Security and Compliance
• Design for resilience

Read his paper at:

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1209/1209.0948.pdf

For the past few months I have not been writing much on this blog as I have concentrated on my academic writing. The first output from this project is now available:  A critical review of cloud computing: researching desires and realities via Journal of Information Technology – Table of Contents.

Through a review of literature and from evidence based on interviews with around 50 industry players, we identify a set of “desires” for those seeking to go to the cloud (split into two dimensions technological desires, and service desires:

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: researching desires and realities

Will Venters and Edgar A Whitley

J Inf Technol advance online publication, August 14, 2012; doi:10.1057/jit.2012.17

Abstract | Full Text | PDF | Request Permission

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.

My review (with Edgar Whitley) of cloud computing is out in Journal of Information Technology in September/December, but before then the most recent review is:

“A Descriptive Literature Review and Classification of Cloud Computing Research” by Haibo Yang and Mary Tate.

Yang, Haibo and Tate, Mary (2012) “A Descriptive Literature Review and Classification of Cloud Computing Research,” Communications of the Association for Information Systems: Vol. 31, Article 2. 

“We present a descriptive literature review and classification scheme for cloud computing research. This includes 205 refereed journal articles published since the inception of cloud computing research. The articles are classified based on a scheme that consists of four main categories: technological issues, business issues, domains and applications, and conceptualising cloud computing. The results show that although current research is still skewed towards technological issues, new research themes regarding social and organisational implications are emerging. This review provides a reference source and classification scheme for IS researchers interested in cloud computing, and to indicate under-researched areas as well as future directions.”

(Note: Since this post was written my article is out – CLICK HERE for details )

.

Congratulations on this fantastic achievement, and to all those who contributed – particularly my friends at GridPP.

For five years I followed the work of those developing the Grid computing infrastructure at CERN (www.pegasus.lse.ac.uk) and the dedication they put into ensuring their ‘small’ contribution to this result (256 data-centres is hardly small). The analysis at CERN which led to this discovery was all run on the worlds largest Grid computing infrastructure – developed in a highly agile way by particle physicists themselves.

(Our research papers on Grid development at CERN)

Venters,W and Kyriakidou-Zacharoudiou,A (2012) “Interventionist Grid Development Projects: A research framework based on three frames.” Information Technology and People.

Zheng,Y.,W. Venters and T. Cornford (2011) “Agility, Paradox and Organizational Improvisation: The Development of a Particle Physics Grid” Information Systems Journal 21(4) 303-333. DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2575.2010.00360.x