1.1 Research Motivation
Government Cloud, or G-Cloud for short, as implied by the name, is the cloud computing framework implemented by the government agency. Several countries, for instance, the United Kingdom, America, Canada, Singapore, and Japan, have their own G-Cloud projects in progress in the last few years. With G-Cloud, government agencies can reduce the need to build out and manage data centers, reduce IT-related costs, adjust cloud-based resources up and down to meet real-time needs to improve operational efficiencies, improve collaboration by providing employees located anywhere with the application and the data stored in the cloud (Microsoft Corporation, 2010).
Cloud computing refers to the on-demand access to virtualized and scalable IT resources, which can be shared by numerous users, paid for via subscription, accessed over the Internet (or network) anytime and anywhere, and rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction (Mell & Grance, 2009). Retracing the history of PC development, we know that there exists a logical flow from mainframes to PCs to cloud computing, with enhanced user experience, lower costs and smaller equipment (Sourya, 2011).
In “From Mainframe to Cloud: 30 Years of Technology Waves,” we also learn that “the cloud didn’t magically appear after all. And it’s certainly more than a passing fad. It’s the cumulative result of all our past computing experience and it will continue to evolve and mature into the
future.” Therefore, cloud computing can be viewed as a new style of computing which evolves from mainframe computer era, pc era, and network era. According to Furht and Escalante (2010), cloud computing has become a significant technology trend, and many experts expect that it will reshape information technology processes and the IT marketplace. The independent research firm Ovum also says in its report that cloud computing has already established itself as the next disruptive technology in the enterprise (Barrett, 2010). In “Executive’s Guide to Cloud Computing (Marks &
Lozano, 2010),” cloud computing is said to be a potential innovation that provide the enterprises
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and the IT suppliers with a great deal of benefits and have some advantages over the traditional IT solutions. As a whole, we believe that it may present government agency and other corporations with a fundamentally different model of IT operation.
Thanks to the dramatic decline of the cost of computing, networking and storage equipment and the rapid evolvement of other specific underlying technology of cloud computing in recent years, such as virtualization, web service, service oriented architecture and the convenient automated self-serve cloud provisioning technology (Furht & Escalante, 2010), users can take advantage of IT resources just like using electricity or water power. The consumption of IT resources is usually billed on a utility or subscription basis. IT users pay for services and capacity only for what have been used. No capital expenditure is required. (Furht & Escalante, 2010). Furthermore, users can request additional resources on demand and just as easily release those resources when they are no longer needed, that is, IT resources can be easily scaled up or down as needed. As to the service providers, they can leverage the economies of scale by spreading the fixed costs over many customers. IT resources can be shared among a huge amount of users and thus increase utilization rate. Generally speaking, cloud computing can bring benefit to users and providers in many ways, for example, lowering total ownership cost (TCO) (Furht & Escalante, 2010), improving
management efficiency, increasing resource utilization rate, having the ability to manage demand peaks, improving financial planning and so forth. It is clear that from our reasoning there should be abundant business opportunities in the industrial value chain above the cloud.
Nevertheless, cloud computing is not without any drawbacks and shortcomings. It is still in its infancy and many aspects of its technology are under development and improvement. As a result, IT users of cloud computing have to afford the risk of some possible technical failure. On the other hand, placing all the data somewhere in the cloud and delegating some or all of the IT-related operation to the cloud service providers is essentially risky because data and machines are not under users’ own control. Also, IaaS service providers have to cope with the compelled data disclosure to the government and are subject to certain privacy and data security laws and regulations in many countries (Hogan Lovells, 2010) and thus increase the risk of data leakage. Moreover, even the
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famous IaaS service provider Amazon’s Web Service (AWS), which “guarantees 99.95%
availability of the service” on its webpage, encountered a four-day service shortage in April 21, 2011. This service shortage slowed or shut down a significant number of prominent Internet businesses and renewed doubts about the viability of cloud computing among skeptics (Claburn, 2011). Moreover, service providers may fail to meet the service level agreement in certain
circumstances because of some technical problems or natural disasters. Thus, data security, privacy and confidentiality, and service availability become critical issues.
Basically, cloud computing includes Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) (Hurwitz, Bloor, Kaufman, & Halper, 2009). These three terms are used to describe the current ways cloud computing serves its customers. IaaS includes hardware, storage, and networking components, which enables an organization to outsource the equipment used to support its operations. The IaaS customer rents computing resources instead of buying and installing them in their own data center (Hurwitz, Bloor, Kaufman, & Halper, 2009).
PaaS offers computing platforms and solution stack (a set of software subsystems) as a service, without the need of buying or managing the underlying hardware and software layer. Its services include programming languages and tools and an application delivery platform hosted by the service provider to support development and delivery of end-user applications (Furht & Escalante, 2010). SaaS enables users to access software such as operating systems and other applications without necessarily downloading or installing them on their systems (Langdon, 2009).
Knowing all the benefits that cloud computing can bring, the government agency of Taiwan in 2010 announced to take advantage of the most fashionable and cutting-edge cloud computing technology and will invest heavily on it for long-term benefits in the near future, hoping it can help provide the best public services to the citizens and to make better use of each penny derived from the tax revenue during the economic downturn in recent years. However, it is still an early
evaluation stage of government’s cloud technology adoption. Few people are certain of the feasibility of implementing cloud computing technology to establish a whole new information infrastructure for the government agency. There are many enablers and disablers affecting the
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adoption of cloud computing in the government agency. The government has to overcome a lot of difficulties and prepare for the adoption before successfully making good use of this technology.
As one of the three building blocks of cloud computing, IaaS, Infrastructure as a Service, is the basis of its two brothers, PaaS and SaaS, and in combination form the G-Cloud. Only when the government agency has its own IaaS infrastructure can it build a platform or some software services onto it. Subsequently, in the very first beginning, it can be inferred that the government agency is bound to pay more attention to the IaaS services no matter whether it wishes to build a cloud computing environment in-house or rent services from outside service providers.
On account of the background information mentioned above, it intrigues us to figure out the answers for the following question: “What are the important factors affecting the adoption of IaaS in the government agency?” Moreover, even though cloud computing can be expected to be more and more important both in academia and industry, there is still few research conducted from a business perspective up to now. Most of them are bound up with pure technology. We think this topic is interesting and worthy of researching. We hope that we can devote our effort to the
academia and complement this field of research and that this thesis can encourage any other future researches.
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1.2 Research Objective
Based on the research background and motivation stated above, the objectives of this research, as the title of the thesis suggests, are as follows:
1. To find out the factors that may affect the adoption of cloud computing technology—
especially the IaaS part─in government agency, and to understand what issues the policy implementers really concern, informing service providers to improve their products and services so as to increase the adoption rate.
2. To contribute to the academia and serve as a reference document for future researchers who are interested in the relevant topic and thus improve the understanding of cloud computing issues.
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