Liviu-Adrian Mihalcea Undergraduate Dissertation 2014/15

Analysis of Cloud-Related Marketing Strategies

Supervised by M.Stannett

Abstract

The modern computer industry continues to grow and operate in very large amounts of data, geographically distributed between millions of people worldwide. Past technologies, such as distributed computing and parallel computing, no longer offer the suitability needed to cope with the more recent technological advancements (Chakravarthy & Kannan, 2014). Thus, from Distributed and Grid Computing, emerged  Cloud  computing, a type of High Performance Computing (HPC) that offers numerous beneficial characteristics such as flexibility, scalability, low cost, portability and more, making it enthusiastically embraced by SMEs from every industry. 

However, before companies could take advantage of the various benefits  Cloud  Computing provides, it had to be marketed first. Today, there are numerous providers that offer  Cloud  Computing as a service, in the form of service models (SaaS, PaaS and IaaS) and more, for something as trivial as a monthly subscription. 

This project will chose a number of successful  cloud  computing providers and provide an analysis on the different strategies that they use, offer an insight on what makes them successful and explore the key elements that differentiate them from one another. 

Moreover, a simulation of a c loud  environment is going to be undertaken in order to better understand how these providers evaluation the different kinds of resource leasing scenarios and optimise the resource access cost, while maintaining a focus on improving their profits.