Design and implementation of a community platform for the evaluation and selection of Cloud Computing Services: A market analysis

Abstract

The large number of available Cloud Computing Services makes it hard for companies to keep an overview of the market and to identify the services that best fit their needs. Also, the search for the most suitable Cloud Computing Services often takes too much time and money. The community platform presented in this article was designed to assist companies and users in solving this problem by enabling them to identify relevant Cloud Computing Services. Furthermore, users have the option of evaluating individual services and get access to the evaluations submitted to the community platform by other users. The paper describes the design and the prototypical implementation of the platform and introduces a maturity model for the quality assessment of Cloud Computing Services listed in the platform's underlying database. The authors also provide recommendations for further action based on a first analysis of the market situation. Our research can be characterized as a design-oriented research approach that focuses on the design of IT artifacts (i.e. community platform and underlying maturity model). Both IT artifacts are evaluated by means of expert interviews and by users giving us feedback when testing our community platform.