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Cloud computing has had a dramatic impact on the way businesses handle IT (Fan et al., 2015). The importance of investment in cloud computing technology for conducting business has been widely recognized (Said et al., 2017). Cloud technology has spurred the interest of businesses and researchers alike with its ability to revolutionize traditional IT delivery with reduced costs, greater elasticity, and ubiquitous access (Hsu et al., 2014). According to a recent worldwide survey in 2020, 49 percent of respondents state that they plan to deploy a hybrid cloud model within three to five years (Statista, 2021).
Few will argue that data has become the lifeblood of organizations. Thus, preserving digital data for the long-term is a crucial and challenging task in the light of rapidly changing technologies and the associated risk of media degradation and obsolete soft/hardware (Burda & Teuteberg, 2016). Fortunately, cloud computing may be the answer to the storage and processing of digital data. The cloud computing model has been increasing in its popularity due to its various benefits such as cost-effectiveness, scalability, usefulness, ease of use, and its anywhere, anytime accessibility.
The benefits and risks of organizations migrating to a cloud are frequently discussed in business literature and many of those same benefits are also available to individual consumers who use cloud computing services. There are many benefits recognized when changing to cloud computing, among the most common is that of no or low cost (Das et al., 2013). Cloud computing is cost effective and can sometimes even be free, depending on the services needed (Changchit & Chuchuen, 2018).
Individual users of cloud computing enjoy similar benefits as organizations. These benefits include anywhere/anytime access, cost savings, extra data storage space, and having the cloud resources serve as an external back-up copy of their data. With today’s Internet and computer technology, there are virtually no performance differences between using cloud computing resources versus storing data and running applications on the local computer. Cloud computing enables a shift from local computing resources to Internet-based services that can be accessed anywhere, anytime and on a variety of devices.
Cloud computing can be categorized into three types of services. The first type of cloud computing service is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) that offers networking, storage space, and computer hardware. The second type of cloud computing service is that of Software as a Service (SaaS) were software applications are hosted, maintained, and updated on the cloud providers servers for their customers to remotely access and use from multiple devices. The third type of cloud computing service is that of Platform as a Service (PaaS) which is a service where the cloud vendor provides application development tools and operating systems. The cloud services of IaaS and SaaS are the services most likely to be used by individual users. The IaaS is the most popular service used by individual cloud users because it includes data storage capacity where individual users can back-up their data and/or store their data to allow for anywhere, anytime access to that data. SaaS is also used by individual users to host applications that can also be accessed anywhere, anytime from a variety of devices.