Reality Vs Hype Does Cloud Computing Meet the Expectations of SMEs?

摘要

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) have become a primary target audience for Cloud Service Providers (CSP), such as Amazon and Microsoft to promote their cloud offering. CSP strong marketing campaigns of ‘promised’ benefits from using their clouds is an attractive offer for SMEs especially where resources are limited and they wish to become more agile and reduce IT costing to be competitive with larger rivals. This paper argues that once SMEs remove the hype surrounding the concept of cloud computing (CC), the reality of significant benefits do not materialize for SMEs. This paper demonstrates, through working with SMEs considering the options of CC that the challenges and risks associated with cloud might actually hinder the business, rather than providing any real long term value.