Special Issue on Cloud Computing and Electronic Commerce: Guest Editors´ Introduction

Abstract

Cloud ComputingCloud computing has been on the agenda of many CIOs (Chief-Information Officers) for the last couple of years. At the same time academic research on cloud computing is slowly emerging. Although mainly Information Technology (IT) operations related, cloud computing is also relevant from an electronic commerce (and electronic business) perspective. Research around cloud computing is becoming more and more prominent, moving from a more technology oriented focus to potential applicability in business domains.Cloud computing is based on similar principals as when the first mainframes were used by academia and corporation, i.e. timesharing. At that time thin clients had access to mainframes, most of the time, on local premises. Since then the world of IT has evolved quickly, and mainly due to the emergence of the Internet and electronic commerce, concepts like utility computing, grid computing, and ideas like the network is the computer became common, resulting in the concepts of cloud computing. Amazon played a key role in developing cloud computing concepts. Amazon analysed that their data centers were using about 10% of their capacity in day-to-day operations only to be prepared for occasional often even seasonal spikes in their operations. Flexibility and efficiency were, and still are key drivers for introducing cloud computing.In 2006 Amazon started to offer their Amazon Web Services as a commercial product to third parties, since then developments went fast Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platforms as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), Data as a Service (DaaS) and nowadays almost Everything as a Service (XaaS) are being offered, either in a public, private, community or hybrid cloud. Common elements of cloud computing are related to virtualization and variety of Resources, shared resource pooling, scalability/rapid elasticity, convenience in use and access, network enabled, SLA's (Service Level Agreement; measured services) and pay per use revenue model. None of the common elements explicitly refer to a specific type of technology. The common elements instead appear to refer to the conditions under which cloud computing resources are acquired (network access, pay-per-use, SLA's, convenience) and the properties of the resources acquired with cloud computing (virtualized, varied, shared, scalable). Cloud Computing is therefore more a paradigm or a paradigm shift in computing. Virtualization is an enabler of this paradigm. Virtualization is a technique which hides the physical characteristics of computing resources from the way in which other systems, applications or end users interact with those resources. Virtualization of both hardware (data, storage, memory, processors, network) and software is possible, as expressed in the different XaaS acronyms.Papers in this Special IssueAlthough a lot of attention is paid to the conceptual background of cloud computing, as well as to the technologies involved. Initially focus on research, next to technology issues, security and privacy, and the ecological relevance of cloud computing, was on the business case of cloud computing: who would be the most likely parties to gain from this new paradigm? However research on cloud computing and electronic commerce is still scarce. With this special issue JTAER wants to put the relevance of cloud computing for electronic commerce on the research agenda. Questions we raised in the call for papers for this special issue related to how is network access to computing, online storage, software, processing, interdependency of access device, web browser access, pay per use, and scalability capacity going to imply for electronic commerce applications? Do changes in cloud architecture have an impact? What are the trade-offs with regard to deployment models such as public, private, hybrid or community clouds, seen the perspective of electronic commerce? Which infrastructure and cloud software services, related to storage, computing capacity, and service management, file storage, appliances, and cloud management impact electronic- commerce? …