Current Research

Our current research in the area of cloud services for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) focuses on the question of building trust at the organizational level.  As a first avenue, we are investigating how a cooperative governance can be used to provide a more trustworthy environment for comparatively small SMEs that would like to contract services from a global-scale cloud service provider.

As a prerequisite, this also requires a consistent model of the economic aspects of using cloud services in the enterprise.  The model should explain in what situations and to what extend cloud services are preferable over in-house solutions – or vice versa.

Once it is clear that certain cloud services ought to be integrated into an SME’s processes, the enterprise needs to have a clear cloud strategy that covers outsourcing possibilities and explains the goals and non-goals of the outsourcing decision.

Future Research

In future research, the developed results need to be tested against real-world scenarios.  For that, we are building an SME partner network with enterprises willing to help investigate the effects of different “cloud sourcing” decisions.

As an additional avenue for future work, we are investigating ways of incorporating legal and regulatory frameworks into the entire “cloud sourcing” process, including the cloud strategy, outsourcing decisions, and the choice of cloud service providers.  Even though this would be very helpful for SMEs in overcoming the legal uncertainty currently associated with using cloud services, the jurisdiction at the moment is still too much “in flux” as to allow such a step already.