Analysis of applications and success factors of cloud computing for small- and medium-sized businesses

Master's Thesis from the year 2012 in the subject Computer Science - Commercial Information Technology grade: 2.0 University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg ; Rheinbach language: English abstract: Cloud computing is gaining importance in the industry and specially within small and medium-sized companies due to the many benefits in terms of cost savings faster time to market scalability cost flexibility and optimization of resources. Today cloud computing is considered as the next IT revolution and the number of articles books papers and technical reports flood the literature. Within the scope of this master thesis relevant cloud computing applications for small- and medium- sized companies are identified and the key success factors for adoption of cloud computing services are analyzed based on the empirical investigation performed as part of this work.Finally the benefits and constraints of the different cloud computing service models are presented including also the state-of-the-art research in the cloud computing area and a summary of the most important results.