CLOUD ADOPTION AND THE FUTURE OF CLOUD

COMPUTING

1 Introduction
Cloud computing is ubiquitously being accepted as the biggest opportunity
as well as the biggest challenge in the IT market these days. It is widely
known that cloud computing has paved new ways of development for the IT
industry but still the bigger enterprises are somewhat reluctant to accept the
cloud. The reason behind this is, as everything valuable comes with a price
and similarly here in cloud computing also there are a few drawbacks. The
only thing we have to worry about the most is security (something which
cant be let aside).But at the same place, even the thousand benefits of
cloud cant be ignored. In this era of technological evolution where the IT
companies face neck to neck competition in every field, cloud computing
seems inevitable.
The vital role it plays in handling the demands of larger business processes
at a very efficient level and in a very low expenditure makes it worth having.
Now, the biggest discussion going on these days is whether switching to
cloud is the huge necessity or is it still a choice for the individual
organizations or the giant enterprises? To move or not to cloud? Future of
cloud computing a clear sky or gloomy one? There has been different
speculations and predictions about cloud going on from a long time. Many
papers are published and different methodologies are proposed to anticipate
the future of cloud computing. SWOT analysis, cloud economics are some of
the studies done to explore the Future of Cloud Computing.

2 Capstone purpose
2.1 Purpose statement
The purpose of this capstone is to identify and to discuss open issues and questions
related to the future of cloud computing.

2.2 Motivation to study and significance of the topic

Cloud computing is quite popular these days due to its large scale efficiency
in computational field. Everything is becoming highly automatic and the
need of the hour is to get rid of human computational efforts through
utilizing the services of cloud. Cloud computing is a disruptive technology
and whenever a new technology emerges, the IT enterprises are skeptical to
adopt it easily and they remain hesitant to invest in the transformation of
their business models and migrate to new methodologies. As in past it is
already analyzed through SWOT analysis and Cloud economics that cloud
offers a bountiful of benefits which obviously comes with a few challenges,
so instead of refraining from trying this new technology the IT researchers
should take up the challenge and propose new ways to address these
problems and explore the opportunities.
Also instead of blindly following the crowd and the latest trends in cloud,
before migrating one should scrutinize different factors which may affect
their unique enterprise infrastructure and processes. As suggested by Tak,
Urgaonkar and SivaSubramanian (2011) Although many potential benefits of
migrating to the cloud can be enumerated some benefits may not apply to
my application (p. 1). So the open issue is whether to migrate or not? There
are several other questions also to consider like: When to migrate to cloud?
Which cloud model to consider for your business? How to distribute your
application processes in a hybrid cloud? What are the latest developments in
cloud which can decide the future of cloud? Finding a solution to these
questions will let the users fully optimize the cloud usage and will eventually
expedite the cloud adoption in future.

2.2.1 Project Goals

The aim of this research paper is to provide a comprehensive perspective on the
Cloud adoption trends and state of the cloud today in the technology market and
the open issues. This will help the organizations in choosing the right cloud
strategies, constructing a future cloud roadmap, architect their own cloud
environments, selecting the correct platform and deploy cloud applications at scale.

2.2.2 Project Objectives

The future is something which can be predicted only through a thorough
analysis of the past and present scenarios and considering all the conclusive
factors. There are areas where the latest developments in the field of cloud
computing are taking place yet there is a lot of scope for improvement like
Mobile Cloud computing, Green cloud, Distributive cloud computing and
Cloud security. The need of the hour is to utilize the latest cloud trends and
face the challenges in order to exploit the cloud services to its fullest in
future.

2.2.3 Potential benefits

Weinman (2011) has concluded that Judicious application of economics
principles convolved with technology trends can lead to useful scenarios for
business and technology planning (p. 2). Cloud computing is heading
towards excellence and potential market has to decide when or if the cloud is
mature enough to be integrated into their system.
3 Prior Work
According to Dave, Dave and Shishodia (2014), Cloud computing facilitates
progress in business, transformation of business models and better efficiency
of information technology in general. Cloud economics deals with the
underlying costs and benefits associated with the cloud. This underlying
economics will be instrumental in shaping the future of the cloud computing
(p. 1).
Apart from cloud economics, there are several other aspects which needs to
be considered such as, which cloud model will be the best for your business?
Which is the most secure cloud computing strategy? And so on.
Open issue 1: When to migrate to cloud?
Cloud-based hosting promises cost advantages over conventional in-house
(on premise) application deployment. One important question the user
should think when considering a move to the cloud is whether it makes sense
for my application to migrate to the cloud. This is the most challenging
question and Answering this questions requires an in-depth understanding
of the cost implications of all the possible choices specific to my
circumstances. In the process they should identify an initial set of key
factors influencing the costs of a deployment choice and investigate the
evolution of costs for various deployment choices. This study of Tak,
Urgaonkar and Sivasubramaniam (2011) show that application
characteristics such as storage capacity, growth rate, workload intensity and
software licensing costs produce complex combined effect on overall costs.
They also discussed issues related to workload variance and horizontal
partitioning (p. 1).Thus, the consumer should consider the overall costs
consisting of transaction costs, opportunity costs, operational costs etc.
before migrating to the cloud.
Open issue 2: Which cloud model to consider for your business in
future?
Coming over to the different types of cloud infrastructures:-There are four
types public, private, hybrid and community cloud deployment.
Goyal (2014) confirmed that there are no such significant differences among the
four models. They all run on the similar technology, one of the pitfalls of public
cloud adoption is data security and privacy. While the private cloud is secure, but
costly, so not every organization can afford its own private cloud. As, Hybrid cloud is
a mix of public and private cloud; organizations store their regular data in the public
cloud and use private cloud to keep their sensitive data in hybrid model. Similarly a
community cloud falls between public and private cloud, as some organizations get
together and form a separate private cloud of their own, called a community cloud
(p. 7).

Perhaps, deciding judiciously which cloud model to adopt can highly

influence our business turnovers.
Open issue 3: How to distribute your application processes in a hybrid
cloud?
Regarding the raised question of which cloud service model to use for the
application, CSCC (2016) has given a very apt explanation related to this: IaaS is
well suitable for cases where the application and its necessary software stack
already exist and the enterprise understands it very well, user just needs to move
the complete set of software into required number of VMs with associated storage
resources. PaaS is well suited particularly for building new custom applications with
least effort and risk. It is also favorable for applications built for runtimes and
services comprising of a complete middleware platform, especially where the
enterprise doesnt want to take the extra responsibility of maintaining and operating
complex software stacks in case required by the application. SaaS is well suited to
cases where the enterprise wants to get rid of the costs and risks of developing
customized applications, where standard off-the-shelf cloud services deliver the
desired business capabilities (p. 12).

They can consist of a mix of different service models accordingly. For

example: It could combine an on premises IaaS with a publicly hosted SaaS
application.
Open issue 4: What are the latest developments in cloud which can
decide the future of cloud?
To answer this let us explore the future of cloud computing for a while. The
future of cloud will be significantly influenced by the innovations and
progress in these areas.
Mobile Cloud Computing
Mobile cloud computing is a distributive technology that aims to alleviate
resource deficiency of a multitude of heterogeneous resourceconstrained
mobile devices by performing resourceintensive computations inside cloud
based resources as defined by Abolfazli, Sanaei, Hadi Sanaei, Shojafar and
Gani (2016).They discussed in details about mobile cloud in the book
Encyclopedia of cloud computing and concluded that despite admirable MCC
findings, several challenges, such as live VM migration, lightweight lowlatency
architecture, seamless mobility and efficient resource scheduling (automatically
allocate resources to intensive mobile tasks) require additional efforts to incorporate
MCC in real scenarios (p. 39).

Green Cloud Computing

Rubyga and SathiaBhama (2016) conducted a study and found out Real time
applications highly rely on the performance of the cloud and the huge
amount of data requests has resulted into the installation of a number of
data repositories worldwide. This has resulted into an increased level of Co2
and other gases emission which is causing a threat to the environment. To
prevent the greenhouse effect it is necessary to generate energy efficient
solutions along with the optimal utilization of the potential resources. The
general solutions of the green cloud include using the renewable resources of
energy for cooling the systems and to produce the power that is needed for
proper working of different parts of the datacenter. The cooling equipment
which consume less power like, chiller and air conditioner can be used in the
data centers. The most important practice which should be used are
consolation and migration (p. 3).
Distributed Cloud Computing
It connects multiple, geographically scattered and smaller data centers
which is a better alternative to todays massive, centralized datacenters as it
reduces communication overheads, latencies and cost by providing nearby
processing and storage resources. Thus, can attract the future market for
cloud. The main challenges are complexity, no scalability, less security and
lack of standards which needs to be tackled and resolved (Coady, Hohlfeld,
Kempf, McGeer & Schmid, 2015, p. 1).
Cloud Security
It is the biggest concern and hindrance in the future of cloud. Ahmed and
Hossain (2014) researched and found out that cloud based services and
geographically dispersed cloud service providers store sensitive information
of various properties at several remote locations which may result in data
being exposed to unwanted parties when the cloud servers are compromised
(p. 1). These cloud security issues deteriorate the credibility of the cloud. The
major security requirements which need to be met are data confidentiality,
access controllability, and integrity and privacy preservation (Tang, Cui, Li,
Ren, Lio and Buyya, 2016, Article 13, p. 33). Future IDS should be capable
enough to prevent DDoS attacks and win over the trust of cloud users.
Open issue 5: What are the benefits and challenges associated with
the cloud which may become deciding factors in future cloud
adoption?
As we see the advantages as well as disadvantages of different cloud
infrastructures and models, a detailed SWOT analysis is needed to examine
the future of cloud computing.
SWOT analysis can be helpful in answering the question raised by Penzel,
Kryvinska, Strauss and Gregu (2015) that whether cloud computing can be
developed to its full potential in between its frontiers or at least developed
enough to be highly adopted by enterprises(p. 1). The SWOT analysis deals
with strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. While the strength
has led to the worldwide popularity of the cloud technology, the
opportunities can structure the future of cloud computing. The most
important actors to create a sustainable and progressive business model are
the opportunities. The realization of these significantly increase the chances
of universal adoption of cloud computing practices.
The strengths are cost effectiveness, flexibility, large scalability, pay-per-use,
less burden of infrastructural tasks and other responsibilities like
maintenance, management and security controls.
Rubyga and SathiaBhama (2016) suggested Green cloud computing as the
latest opportunity for cloud users to build a business model that is eco-
friendly (p. 141). As cloud computing uses minimal resources but still
operates more efficiently than traditional data centers, it contributes to
smarter use of energy. But the smarter use of technology leads to more
complexity. To face this challenge, enterprises can outsource complex tasks
to to-the-point-qualified services to run these structures. Cloud computing
environment can be reformed in order to minimize the complexity. If
providers offer transparency about the services, then the users and the
public develop awareness on the privacy and cloud security issues.
Virtualization serves customers directly without the installation of software
on each device which facilitates access at lower price. The system becomes
faster, with frequent updates and resources are provided more efficiently
(Penzel, Kryvinska, Strauss and Gregu, 2015, p. 2).
Cloud computing is a disruptive innovation (the term was first coined by
Christensen (1997) in his management classic The Innovators Dilemma , p.
9), so it doesnt need to provide the full potential of an existing technology if
the user doesnt require that. Cloud computing is a booming market for
customers with lower ability to pay thus having lower expectations. When
developed in the right way disruptive technology can meet the demands of
customers with higher expectations and demands later on. Same way cloud
computing in the initial stages of development mostly served small
customers and improved their abilities. Several case studies show that
bigger enterprises and even global companies are now migrating to cloud.
Next step, the cloud computing is now targeting the demands for public
clouds rather than private.
The most critical weaknesses of cloud computing are trust issues. When trust
is considered even control, performance, reliability, security and maturity
threatens as a weakness. Most clouds are not interoperable. While switching
between the service providers data either is lost or cant be transferred to
the new provider.
In contrast to the weaknesses there is a possibility to remove most of the
Threats. The undecided standards and unclear legal condition off cloud
computing hinders it from achieving the value it deserves. Security threatens
cloud computing as consumers are dependent on a third party provider.
Poorly designed systems are also an issue for cloud adopters. Other major
issue is infancy, enterprises and especially large companies dont rely on
infant systems (Penzel, Kryvinska, Strauss and Gregu, 2015, p. 3).

4 Approach
4.1 Plan
Exploring the cloud trends
In compiling the State of the Cloud Survey results, RightScale uses Cloud
Maturity Model to segment and analyze organizations based on their levels
of cloud adoption: Cloud Watchers are developing cloud strategies and plans.
Cloud Beginners are working on proof-of-concepts or initial cloud projects.
Cloud Explorers have multiple projects and applications deployed in the
cloud. Cloud Focused businesses are heavily using cloud infrastructure. We
can also follow the same classification model as it looks apt for identifying
the level of cloud users in order to derive the below analytics information.

Analysis of organizations based on levels of Cloud adoption

This will include analyzing percentage of cloud users who are still planning to
use cloud, or those who have just started using cloud, others may include
those who already have apps running in cloud and the rest may be ones who
are heavily utilizing the cloud services. The finding in the latest survey in
2016 is that the most percentage of Cloud users are in the most mature
stages now Cloud Explorers and Cloud Focused (RightScale, 2016, p. 7).

Analysis of Cloud adoption of different cloud services

To determine the best cloud offering for your business, it is important to
understand (or at least have a good idea of) your compute, storage, and
networking requirements as mentioned by Williams (2012) in the book The
Economics of Cloud Computing: An Overview for Decision Makers (ch.1 p.
13).
It will deal with which cloud service model to consider for your business,
which one will benefit your overall revenue the most and what are your
expectations with the service in terms of security, reliability, availability,
interoperability etc. can be the deciding factors. For instance, in a cloud
survey by KPMG in India, 68 percent of the initial respondents conveyed that
they mostly plan to adopt either PAAS or SAAS, i.e. about 80 percent planned
to embrace SAAS as compared to bigger organizations (Survey Findings 01,
p. 19).

Analysis of Cloud adoption in different applications

While cloud adoption is gaining demand heavily, still enterprises run only a
fraction of their workloads in the cloud. According to the cloud survey of
2015 by Right Scale, among prime candidates of applications for migration to
cloud, only a fraction of enterprises reported running almost all of the
workloads in the cloud: 38 percent of enterprises ran almost all development
and test in the cloud, 34 percent ran almost all websites in the cloud, and
only 30 percent ran almost all web applications in the cloud (p. 12). So if the
cloud benefits dont apply to the consumers particular application then its
not a profitable decision to move all the workload to cloud.

Analysis of Cloud adoption of different cloud deployment model

Cloud migration reached ubiquity in 2014.Public cloud was more popular
than private cloud initially but private cloud also gained popularity in later
years. In 2015, Hybrid cloud was the preferred cloud strategy and even in
2016 hybrid cloud adoption is ramping as both the cloud service providers
and users mature driving hybrid cloud adoption. Similarly, even private cloud
adoption is increasing every year as found by many surveys. Based on the
terminology of hybrid cloud computing, many combination of cloud resources
can be utilized in a hybrid cloud deployment. So its a very important aspect
to decide how to distribute your application processes in a hybrid cloud?

Analysis of Cloud adoption from different cloud service providers

Cloud service providers continued adding services and costs continued to
drop, thus overall cloud adoption increased. AWS still leads in public cloud
from the past many years. Azure PaaS and IaaS both showed increase in
adoption and there are many who are planning to use it very soon.
DigitalOcean and Oracle Cloud are also slowly entering the market. The
private cloud adoption is developing across all providers. Across all sizes of
firms, almost half of them harness VMware vSpehere followed by openstack
and VMware vCloud suite etc. In comparison to last year there were
significant increase in the adoption rates of all private cloud technologies
(except cloudstack). Among enterprises, current private cloud usage was
skewed towards traditional vendors. Hence the enterprises need to take a
wise selection between the different CSPs so that the company could
optimize the cloud cost in future along with security.
Analysis of Cloud adoption in different sectors
Some of the benefits of Cloud services that would be commonly experienced
in any industry sector are: - flexibility, interoperability and scalability.
Besides, there are certain applications of the Cloud that can revolutionize
certain industries in the longer term. For ex: - In a survey by KPMG in India
they found out that in government sector, the cloud can be instrumental for
the public agencies to meet the open government requirements and access
to a shared pool of easily available software and hardware resources.
Because these benefits directly improvise the effectiveness of governance
the cloud has gained the worldwide attention from government agencies.

Similarly, health information digitization is being seen as a means to provide

prompt and timely healthcare services along with improved quality care with
deeper computing alternatives. Healthcare providers are already using public
cloud with many who have started experimenting with private clouds as well.

However, privacy issues and data security has kept several players from
adapting the cloud. Even though cloud services in health care is at a nascent
stage, future seems to be very promising with its adoption increasing
globally. Thus, cloud adoption can vary across different sectors and thereby
expecting cloud computing to have a mixed future overall if we consider this
analysis.

Analysis of challenges which may hamper the cloud future

There are many loopholes in the cloud implementation which are yet not fully
resolved, some of which are privacy and security, interoperability, shortage
of trained resources, cost management and optimization strategies are the
major challenges now and can largely impact the future of cloud. User has to
inspect which is the most secure cloud environment?

Analysis of Latest cloud trends which seem to have a bright future

Overall DevOps adoption rises from the last year with achieving more
popularity among the enterprises. Overall Docker adoption also more than
doubles to vs. in 2015; and many had plans to utilize Docker in 2016. An
even higher percentage of enterprises are inclined towards Docker and plan
to use it in coming future. Use of Puppet and Chef Approaches also grew.
Ansible makes strong gains, used by almost double of respondents as
compared to in 2015 (RightScale, 2016, p. 24).
Analysis of Cloud Benefits for Cloud Beginners
Cloud Beginners are seeing significant gains in cloud benefits as every year
passes. The largest gains were in business continuity, scalability, higher
availability, cost reduction and faster access to infrastructure found out
unanimously by many surveys. These gains indicate that as cloud providers
and best practices have matured, new cloud users are able to get to value
more easily thus cloud adoption is more likely to increase.

4.2 Challenges or barriers

This process will require analyzing number of factors and thus collecting lots
of error free data from trust worthy resources and collecting it from all types
of industries and sectors, small as well large scale enterprises across the
geography.
The predictive and probabilistic models are never 100 percent accurate. They
can only derive the most probable outcomes but cant be considered for
prophesying the future of a disruptive technology.

4.3 Limitations
To narrow down this research we can target one specific industry which is
highly significant for predicting the future of cloud.

4.4 Deliverables
Table of Contents

1. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
2. COPYRIGHT
3. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
3.1 Keyword Definitions
3.2. Abstract
3.3. Introduction
3.4 Review of Methodology
3.5. Analysis of Cloud Adoption in Past and Present
i. Analysis of cloud adoption in different sectors
ii. Analysis of cloud adoption of different cloud services
iii. Analysis of cloud adoption in different applications
iv. Analysis of cloud adoption of different deployment models
3.6. Latest Trends in Cloud
3.7. Benefits
3.8. Challenges
3.9. Future Scope
3.10. Conclusion/Summary
4. BIBLIOGRAPHY

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