Guest Editors' Introduction to Special Issue on Cloud Computing

Abstract

The Internet has come into our life and every thing is moving to the Internet [1]. A paragonic example is cloud computing, which runs on the Internet continuously and is fast becoming more and more popular and delivering more and more business value [2]. Many well-known companies such as Salesforce, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have amplified their value by cloud computing. Specifically, Salesforce delivers customer relationship management (CRM), Amazon offers a cloud service called the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Google provides low cost computing and storage services named App Engine, and Microsoft Windows offers the Azure Services Platform [3]. All cloud computing services are on Internet. These phenomena have both brought about and contribute to one of the hottest contemporary development trends in the Internet, namely cloud computing. This special issue is intended to foster the dissemination of state-of-the-art research in the area of cloud computing that is helping to fulfill the dream of anytime and anywhere access.
The special issue opens with an article by Lee et al., entitled “Factors Influencing the Adoption of Enterprise Cloud Computing.” The authors use the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) for analysis and employ the Technology, Organization, and Environment (TOE) framework to study factors that either facilitate or hinder the adoption of cloud computing in enterprises. Their results show that new business opportunities is the most important facilitating factor and the most important hindering factor is weakness in information protection. Their results also indicate that cost saving has no substantial impact on the decision of an enterprise to adopt cloud computing. Lin and Chen investigate optimal routing in cloud networks with time constraints. Based on backtracking method, the authors propose an efficient method to enable the possibility of providing optimal dynamic routing services to solve the timeliness problem in the cloud computing environment. Their results show that an optimal routing path from the end-user to the specific server with various time constraints can be efficiently derived. Chung et al. researched the balance of the load of business intelligence (BI) systems queries in a cloud computing environment. BI is a good application of cloud computing because its sporadic queries require a huge amount of computation and storage capacity. The authors propose a greedy allocation approach to distribute BI data and take advantage of MapReduce computation power. Their results show that the proposed method can balance the load of business intelligence (BI) systems queries and find an effective plan in reasonable time.
The special issue ends with an article by Mbuba and Wang, which is entitled “Software as a Service Adoption: Impact on IT Workers and Functions of IT Department.” The authors examine how SaaS adoption may change not only IT workers’ roles and tasks, but also the structure of IT departments. Software as a Service (SaaS) enhances the reliability and scalability of IT systems. The authors use adaptive structuration theory to design a modified framework to support the change of dynamics when SaaS is adopted. Their results contribute to adaptive structuration theory by exploring the new structure and its impacts on IT workers.
We thank the authors for their efforts on these insightful articles and their willingness to respond to the many requests for changes and adjustments to their papers prior to acceptance. Finally, we would like to thank a number of people who also participated in developing this special issue on the cloud computing.