Section 4. The need for a roadmap for IS professionals and researchers on
cloud computing As with any computing model, the technological landscape is rapidly evolving in cloud computing. Even though it might be impossible to conjecture all the technological changes in future, the economic forces shaping this phenomenon, in contrast, are very logical and almost inexorable in nature. While we leave the technical aspects of cloud computing (or what one might call the “supply side” of cloud computing) in the able hands of computer scientists within the industry and academia, an equally intriguing set of questions is being asked by the customers at the “demand” end, which perhaps is
being addressed much less. One of the key objectives of this article is to therefore explore the latter issues. As Nicholas Carr [10] has astutely noted, the biggest impediment to cloud computing “will not be technological but attitudinal” (p. 71). Based on their decades of experience, corporate computing has developed its own standards regarding the reliability, stability and security of its information systems, and comprehensive answers need to be provided on all fronts before cloud computing can become a viable option for the larger corporate customers. It has to be confessed that many cloud applications today lack some of the functionality of their traditional counterparts (at the same time, the ubiquitous nature of the cloud allows the cloud applications to have some unique characteristics that are not readily available in their traditional counterparts). As a result, some applications might not be currently suitable for transition to a cloud but might nevertheless need to interact with other cloud-based applications: managing these interactions will pose a technological and contractual challenge for organizations. Many organizations will be understandably wary of the lack of control over the information or the infrastructure,5 or of the possibility of vendor lock-in in the absence of standards. Cloud applications do not yet have the availability or quality-of-service guarantees that some organizations demand (perhaps sometimes unreasonably) from their IT vendors. Like any other service that depends on centrally located data, cloud services are subject to outages or even data loss that could result from reasons as varied as hardware and/or software failure to acts of nature or terrorist attacks. The recent outages of Google's GMail service or Microsoft's Danger division's loss of some of the data of T-Mobile's mobile customers have provided fodder to critics of cloud computing who believe that cloud computing is inherently unreliable. Other weaknesses include limitations of bandwidth for certain dataintensive applications, and the problem with short-lived virtual computers in carrying out IT forensics. The development of the cloud as a viable computing platform also faces potential threats from entrenched incumbents that range from IT providers whose business is geared towards the traditional model to corporate IT divisions that resist change either due to inertia or from the prospects of job loss in the new environment. As we detail in the subsequent sections (and especially in Section 7), the new environment brings to the fore the role of many regulatory agencies, at the local, national and even at the international level. Many governments are becoming increasingly interested in cloud computing [17], and some of them are proactively working with many of the major players today in order to develop standards and sensible regulation that do not stifle innovation but at the same time ensure privacy of information and the security of data.
With so many sweeping changes over the horizon, the role of IS researchers in the new environment cannot be stressed enough. If organizations are to reap the full benefits of cloud computing, we passionately believe that it is imperative for IS researchers, as the
experts and the thought leaders in the area, to be proactively involved in every discussion surrounding the technology from its very outset. As Agarwal and Lucas [1] note about the IS community, “our strength as a scholarly community derives partly from our study of the firstorder, second-order and third-order effects of IT that span multiple functional areas and business processes” (p.390). With our background in the underlying technology and the associated business issues, IS researchers can bring forth a holistic perspective that has
often been lacking in many technology discussions. We also note that while there is an impressive amount of literature on cloud computing in computer science, there is still a dearth of literature in the IS area that look at cloud computing. One of the goals of this paper is to start that process by presenting a starting list of the various issues at the
intersection of the business and the technology involved in cloud computing.
We pursue several objectives in the remainder of this paper. First, from a practitioner's perspective, we strategically analyze the cloud computing industry. Second, we identify the various stakeholders —whether they are the providers of cloud computing or the consumers
and the regulators who have to deal with the technology. Third, and perhaps most importantly, from an IS researcher's perspective, our aim is to bring forth the issues that are likely to be important to these stakeholders, and thereby suggest some of the research topics that we should start exploring and be in a position to advise the community in due course. In a bid to ensure that our prescription is not biased from just one perspective, this group of authors consists of members from the academia along with a senior executive from a software company that is currently developing applications for some of the largest players in the cloud computing arena. We also carried out in-depth interviews with various industry executives, in order to get both a cloud computing provider perspective as well as an enterprise user perspective.6