COST FACTORS ANALYSIS OF CLOUD COMPUTING SERVICES: A REVIEW OF LITERATURE

Abstract

In the current financial crisis and the growing need for quality information flow in organizations are under increasing pressure to provide more from less. The use of cloud computing in organizations relieves a load of sophisticated Information Technology (IT) infrastructure administration and maintenance operations while also resulting in significant cost savings. The use of cloud computing services appears to offer significant cost advantages particularly start-up companies since frequently they do not operate an internal IT infrastructure. Cloud promises to deliver affordable, reliable, and flexible computing solutions to the education sector and enable it to compete more effectively with bigger organizations. In this paper, the particular cost types and factors of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) are presented for cloud computing services. A comparative analysis of cloud-based hosting versus conventional (on-premise) application deployment has also been summarized. This paper aims to spur the communities on the knowledge of cloud computing implementation investment consideration in the perspective of Malaysian organizations and how to estimate costs of cloud-based systems before they enter the operational phase. Systematic literature review applied in this study, analysis of real cloud computing services for the development and evaluation of the basic mathematical model. This is necessary to make economical IT investment decisions for or against cloud computing more objective.