A Social Network Approach to Provisioning and Management of Cloud Computing Services for Enterprises

Research indicates that many organizations tend to underutilize the substantial investments made in IT resources, while their counterparts in other parts of the world lack the basic IT resources needed for their production. Making the spare IT resources available to those who need them most has been extremely difficult in the past; but with the advent of cloud computing, this problem should be less difficult to solve. Opportunistic Cloud Services (OCS) is about enterprises leveraging cloud computing technologies to contribute spare IT resources to a platform so that others on the platform can utilize them as and when needed. The OCS network is modelled as a social network of enterprises collaborating strategically in contributing and utilizing cloud services without entering into any business agreements.
Such a platform faces several problems. One of such problems is the free riding problem, in which members will want to use services on the platform without ever contributing. Other problems are trust and security management problems on the platform. The feasibility of the development of the OCS management platform has been the focus of this research work. Despite some limitations and major challenges that were discovered during this study, the obtained results demonstrate both the technical feasibility and the existence of enabling conditions for the implementation of opportunistic cloud services for enterprises.