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This paper aims to examine the dynamism of causal relationships among cloud computing (CC) adoption factors in the Indian context, considering the perspectives of both the cloud adopter and cloud provider.

The case-study method has been used to understand the dynamics among the factors. Using data from specific cases in India, causal loop diagrams (CLDs) have been developed. System dynamic modeling (SDM) and simulation are used to study the relationships and their effect on the adoption rate.

The results revealed that adoption of CC depends on various factors such as persuasion (time-saving, cost-saving and word of mouth) and constraint factors (security and financial loss). However, it is seen that the adoption rate is very sensitive to changes in adoption per contact and word of mouth. Further, the adopter firm has a quicker time to market, which gives an added advantage to the firm. Also, with CC services, a firm can fulfill its projects or clients' requirements with little to no upfront investment in information technology (IT) services.

Lack of security, standardization and undefined service-level agreements are a few pressing issues that make it difficult for firms to evaluate the performance and reliability of services. Hence, immediate attention is needed to make transparent policies on CC and its services, thereby building trust.

This is the first and only work that has tried to explore and empirically test the dynamics of critical factors while making an adoption decision, considering both the adopter and provider perspectives. This study shows the journey of a firm, starting from being a prospective adopter to an adopter and continuous user. The work also empirically tested how adopters of technology benefit from the technology.

The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the vulnerabilities of the cloud platform affecting businesses trading on the internet. It aims to examine the appropriateness of the cloud computing, its benefits to the industry and helps to identify security concerns for businesses that plan to deploy one of the cloud platforms. It helps to identify areas where businesses should focus before choosing an appropriate Cloud Service Provider (CSP).

This paper presents the findings of an original research survey (200 IT professionals working both in the public and private sectors) undertaken to examine their privacy, and data security concerns associated with the cloud platform. Views of those who have yet to deploy cloud were analysed to detect the patterns of common security issues. Cyber fraud and trust concerns of the organisations are addressed and deployment of the secured cloud environment is outlined.

The survey analysis highlighted that the top concerns for organisations on cloud were security (93.8 per cent), governance (61.1 per cent) and a lack of control over service availability (56.6 per cent). The survey highlighted that the majority of IT professionals were not aware that some CSPs currently control the decryption keys that enable them to decrypt their client's data. This should be considered as a major security concern and it is one of the factors that should be looked into while vetting the service level agreement (SLA). Data loss and leakage (73.5 per cent) were voted as the top threat to cloud computing by respondents; this was followed by account, service and traffic hijacking (60.8 per cent). The paper examines various types of cloud threats companies have encountered.

The vast majority of the data are drawn from IT professionals with businesses mainly in the UK and the USA.

The paper advocates a proactive and holistic cloud‐cyber security prevention typology to prevent e‐crime, with guidance of what features to look for when choosing an appropriate cloud service provider.

This is the first analysis done that includes IT auditors, physical security personnel as well as IT professionals. The paper is of value to companies considering adoption or implementation of a cloud platform. It helps to assess the cloud by evaluating a detailed comparison of benefits and risk associated with the platform.

Cloud computing (CC) services have given a tremendous boost to the creation of efficient and effective solutions. With developing countries at a slow pace of adoption, this research aims to identify factors and their interrelationships influencing the adoption of CC in a developing country context. The developing countries are enjoying numerous benefits from CC services; however, its low adoption is still a question in developing economies; hence, the authors have selected the context of information and communication technology (ICT) firms in India.

The qualitative research method is used where experts from thirteen ICT firms in India are interviewed.

Sixteen factors, twenty-eight subfactors, and 25 interrelationships are revealed through content analysis. Further, causal loop diagrams are proposed to display the behavior of cause and effect of these factors from a system's perspective. This will help to understand the relationships among the factors in order to enhance the speed of CC adoption. Possible financial loss and resistance to change are found as the key barriers to adoption. The proposed interrelationships can guide both policymakers and service providers for designing effective CC policies.

This is the first scholarly work that identifies interrelationships among factors and subfactors, thereby providing a holistic picture to decision-makers while making a choice on whether to adopt cloud services or continue with on premise data centers and servers.

Cloud computing is a relatively new phenomena. It has rarely been examined in the context of the small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The purpose of this paper is to examine the drivers and barriers to cloud computing adoption by SMEs in Ireland.

This study adopted an exploratory approach. A quantitative approach was adopted in the data collection phase. An online self-completion questionnaire was distributed by e-mail to 1,500 SMEs in Ireland. A response rate of 6 per cent was achieved generating 95 usable responses.

Findings from this study indicate that Irish SMEs are adopting cloud technology. The key driver identified is the resultant cost benefits for the firm. However, concern over continuous availability of the service is identified by the SME as a key challenge and is hindering widespread adoption of cloud technology.

This study whilst exploratory in nature, has laid the foundation for further research in the area of cloud computing adoption. This research should enable further studies to replicate this process with the possibility of extending the study to include other countries, on a larger scale and with a particular focus on the knowledge intensive business services sector. This study would benefit from adding a qualitative perspective to the research topic to add depth and enhance the “richness” of the data collected during the process.

This study concludes that policy makers and cloud providers need to provide assurances to SMEs over issues of continuous availability of the cloud service through increased and on-going investment in a high-speed, broadband infrastructure and through ensuring issues pertaining to standardization and compliance are resolved.

This exploratory research has illuminated this area through examining the drivers and barriers to cloud adoption by SMEs. In the Irish context, the benefits of engaging in such activity can reap many benefits. Of particular importance to a peripheral economy such as Ireland is the value of adopting cloud computing which is central to offering competitive advantage and controlling costs.

Government is the biggest spender on cloud computing technology but a very limited study and data sets are available to assess the cloud adoption trends in government organizations in India. As India is ushering towards “Digital India” it becomes essential for the government to embrace the cloud to enhance governance and meet the citizen expectations. This paper aims to discuss the evolution of cloud computing (Meghraj) in government organizations by examining the various information technology (IT) and cloud policies, thereby focusing on the policy gaps. The second part of this study assesses the cloud adoption trend by analyzing adopted cloud services, deployments models, leading sectors in cloud adoption and cloud approach. Eventually, in consultation with experts, a conceptual framework for cloud adoption in the government organizations of India is developed for wider cloud adoption.

The authors reviewed various IT/cloud policies and related literature to find the policy gaps for slow cloud adoption in government organizations. Authors have researched to collect the data from the various government procurement portals and analysed the tender and contracts of 500 organizations for cloud requirements to infer the cloud adoption trends. Based on the review of policy gaps, adoption trends and by consulting the experts a conceptual cloud adoption framework has been developed for wider cloud adoption in government organizations.

This study can be a pathfinder where the most innovative findings are about the cloud adoption trends in the government organizations in the time frame from 2013 till 2020. Several key findings are – the public cloud are the most widely adopted, infrastructure as a service model is the most used services, the majority of the applications migrating to the cloud are legacy applications, the leading sector in cloud adoption are – IT, transport and education. It is observed that the pandemic Covid-19 has acted as a catalyst and accelerated cloud adoption in government organizations. Eventually, a conceptual cloud adoption framework has been suggested addressing the policy gaps, deficiencies, overcoming the gaps and their related outcomes for the wider cloud adoption in the government organizations.

The findings of this work highlight the cloud adoption trends in government organizations which can prove vital to the policymakers. This work will assist policymakers, government organizations, researchers, IT professionals and others interested in analyzing the state of cloud adoption. The conceptual cloud adoption framework developed endeavours to uncover the policy gaps, suggest the gap resolution mechanism and outcomes which may assist the organization for wider cloud adoption. This research work effectively connects the policies to practice by stimulating the interest in understanding the policies, strategies and thereby creating the enabling environment for cloud adoption. This study provides feedback on cloud adoption trends which can assist in policy refinement and further strengthen policy/strategies.

As of date, there is limited data available for cloud adoption in government organizations. This work uniquely presents the cloud projections which helps to gain insights on cloud adoption trends in government organizations. This study is the first of its kind, focusing on cloud adoption in the unexplored government sector. This study provides a comprehensive summary of adoption statistics, policy analysis and practice in government organizations of India.

The purpose of the study is to develop a cloud supporting model for green computing. In today's contemporary world, information technology (IT) plays a significant role. Because of the rapid growth of the IT business and the high level of greenhouse gas emissions, salient data centers are increasingly considering green IT techniques to reduce their environmental impacts. Both developing and underdeveloped countries are widely adopting green infrastructure and services over the cloud because of its cost-effectiveness, scalability and guaranteed high uptime. Several studies have investigated the fact that cloud computing provides beyond green information and communication technology (ICT) services and solutions. Therefore, anything offered over clouds also needs to be green to reduce the adverse influence on the environment.

This paper examines the rationale for the use of green ICT in higher education and finds crucial success variables for the implementation of green ICT on the basis of an analysis of chosen educational organizations and interviews with key academic experts from the Universities of Ethiopia, in general, and BuleHora University, in particular.

Finally, this paper described the design and development of a green cloud selection supporting model for green ICTs in higher educational institutions that helps cloud service customers choose the most green cloud-based ICT products as well as services.

This study may be a significant source of new information for green ICT design and implementation in higher education institutions to preserve the environment and its impact on human life.

As the storage and processing requirement of digital information is increasing on the cloud, it is very difficult for the single cloud provider (CP) to meet the resource requirement. Multiple providers form a federation for the execution of users’ requests. For the federated cloud, this paper aims to address the issue distribution of users’ request for resources and revenue among the providers by offering fair and stable distribution models for the federated cloud.

This paper uses cooperative game (CG)-theoretical models, i.e. Shapley–Shubik power index (SSPI) and Banzhaf power index (BPI) for distribution. Performance is analysed using variance and monotonicity using a case study.

Numerical analysis is done using two scenarios. Monotonicity is evaluated. Results show that SSPI performs better as compared to BPI in terms of fairness accuracy and the framework provide the fair distribution of revenue among providers in the federated cloud.

The proposed framework works efficiently under the specific defined conditions.

Paper provides the fair distribution. It assist the centralised cloud exchange in managing the users’ request in such a way every CPs, in the federated cloud will get an equal chance of serving the users’ request. The framework also provides the stable federation. Proposed work provides less rejection rate of users’ request. Finally, it assists the providers in increasing their profits in the federation.

This paper presents a CG theoretic-based framework for the distribution of resources required and revenue. The framework analysed the performance of distribution models by considering the variance and monotonicity for multiple users’ requests.

This paper follows a systematic literature review (SLR) method covering the published studies until March 2021. The authors have extracted the related studies from different online databases utilizing quality-assessment-criteria. In order to review high-quality studies, 32 papers have been chosen through the paper selection process. The selected papers have been categorized into three main groups, decision-making methods (17 papers), meta-heuristic methods (8 papers) and fuzzy-based methods (7 papers). The existing methods in each group have been examined based on important qualitative parameters, namely, time, cost, scalability, efficiency, availability and reliability.

Cloud computing is known as one of the superior technologies to perform large-scale and complex computing. With the growing tendency of network service users to utilize cloud computing, web service providers are encouraged to provide services with various functional and non-functional features and supply them in a service pool. In this regard, choosing the most appropriate services to fulfill users' requirements becomes a challenging problem. Since the problem of service selection in a cloud environment is known as a nondeterministic polynomial time (NP)-hard problem, many efforts have been made in recent years. Therefore, this paper aims to study and assess the existing service selection approaches in cloud computing.

The obtained results indicate that in decision-making methods, the assignment of proper weights to the criteria has a high impact on service ranking accuracy. Also, since service selection in cloud computing is known as an NP-hard problem, utilizing meta-heuristic algorithms to solve this problem offers interesting advantages compared to other approaches in discovering better solutions with less computational effort and moving quickly toward very good solutions. On the other hand, since fuzzy-based service selection approaches offer search results visually and cover quality of service (QoS) requirements of users, this kind of method is able to facilitate enhanced user experience.

Although the current paper aimed to provide a comprehensive study, there were some limitations. Since the authors have applied some filters to select the studies, some effective works may have been ignored. Generally, this paper has focused on journal papers and some effective works published in conferences. Moreover, the works published in non-English formats have been excluded. To discover relevant studies, the authors have chosen Google Scholar as a popular electronic database. Although Google Scholar can offer the most valid approaches, some suitable papers may not be observed during the process of article selection.

The outcome of the current paper will be useful and valuable for scholars, and it can be a roadmap to help future researchers enrich and improve their innovations. By assessing the recent efforts in service selection in cloud computing and offering an up-to-date comparison of the discussed works, this paper can be a solid foundation for understanding the different aspects of service selection.

Although service selection approaches have essential impacts on cloud computing, there is still a lack of a detailed and comprehensive study about reviewing and assessing existing mechanisms in this field. Therefore, the current paper adopts a systematic method to cover this gap. The obtained results in this paper can help the researchers interested in the field of service selection. Generally, the authors have aimed to specify existing challenges, characterize the efficient efforts and suggest some directions for upcoming studies.

Nowadays, communications, products, services and costs are customized through the internet technology. The main theory to continue competitiveness in the organizations is customer relationship management (CRM). CRM enables organizations to efficiently interact with customers and gather, store and examine their data for providing a complete view of them. On the other hand, the subject of cloud computing has increasingly become the bridge for the success of the CRM implementation. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the impact of cloud computing (new cloud facility, knowledge of information technology (IT), cloud security and cost) on the success of CRM systems.

The model and the questioners-based data are analyzed using the Smart PLS 3.0. The data were gathered based on 80 employees of three main agricultural companies in Iran.

The obtained results have indicated that all of the considered factors, new cloud facilities, knowledge of IT, cloud security and cost, play an important role in CRM systems’ success. Also, the evaluation and examination of the consistency and validity of the model are performed through the structural equation model.

First, the authors have conducted a study in a single region. It cannot be guaranteed that the results can be generalized to other regions. Second, for this cross-sectional study, the research design was conducted that showed constant relationships between variables. The research done for this study is cross-sectional. Third, because of time and financial restrictions, the authors have gathered data using a sample from a single location.

Proposing a new model for investigating of the impact of cloud computing (new cloud facility, knowledge of Information Technology (IT), cloud security and cost) on the success of CRM systems is the main originality of this paper.

This paper aims to develop a model and measurement to investigate the factors influencing cloud computing adoption as a part of developing countries’ alternatives to implement e-government services.

This study proposes a theoretical model based on the literature of technology adoption models. It constructs scale measurements for the proposed model constructs by extracting and adapting the items from the literature. The authors verify the scales’ content validity and reliability by applying face validity, pre-testing and pilot study. For the pilot study, the authors collect the data from 26 information technology staff in five public organizations in Yemen. The authors test the reliability of the scales using Cronbach’s alpha criterion, and then conduct exploratory factor analysis to evaluate the validity of the scales.

The results show that the scale measurements meet the conventional criteria of reliability and validity.

Theoretically, this paper provides an integrated model for examining cloud computing adoption for e-government implementation in developing countries. In addition, it develops an instrument to empirically investigate the influencing factors of cloud computing adoption in the context of developing countries’ e-government initiatives.