Deliverable No.3 of the STOA Project "Potential and Impacts of Cloud Computing Services and Social Network Sites”
This report focuses on the impacts of Cloud Computing and the resulting challenges. It is based on an evaluation of the available scientific and industry literature, as well as on expert interviews. It should be mentioned that statements regarding Cloud Computing in reports and media on this are often contradictory. One reason for this is that various definitions are used. Some authors apply “cloud washing” and rename traditional outsourcing or web services. Based on the previous deliverable we focus on common used definitions such as the one from NIST. A second issue is that statements often are based on experts estimation due to lack of reliable time series of data. This explains the great bandwidth of results, which have to be taken with care.