title: A study on strategic provisioning of cloud computing services.
abstract: Cloud computing is currently emerging as an ever-changing, growing paradigm that models "everything-as-a-service." Virtualised physical resources, infrastructure, and applications are supplied by service provisioning in the cloud. The evolution in the adoption of cloud computing is driven by clear and distinct promising features for both cloud users and cloud providers. However, the increasing number of cloud providers and the variety of service offerings have made it difficult for the customers to choose the best services. By employing successful service provisioning, the essential services required by customers, such as agility and availability, pricing, security and trust, and user metrics can be guaranteed by service provisioning. Hence, continuous service provisioning that satisfies the user requirements is a mandatory feature for the cloud user and vitally important in cloud computing service offerings. Therefore, we aim to review the state-of-the-art service provisioning objectives, essential services, topologies, user requirements, necessary metrics, and pricing mechanisms. We synthesize and summarize different provision techniques, approaches, and models through a comprehensive literature review. A thematic taxonomy of cloud service provisioning is presented after the systematic review. Finally, future research directions and open research issues are identified.
authors.affiliation: Center for Mobile Cloud Computing Research (C4MCCR), University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
authors.forename: Md
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-2822-0657
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Whaiduzzaman
authors.affiliation: School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, The University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW 2308, Australia.
authors.forename: Mohammad Nazmul
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-0598-0867
authors.initials: MN
authors.lastname: Haque
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada N6A 3K7.
authors.forename: Md
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Rejaul Karim Chowdhury
authors.affiliation: Center for Mobile Cloud Computing Research (C4MCCR), University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
authors.forename: Abdullah
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-4388-020X
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Gani
mesh_terms: D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods* / Q000592:standards; D020407:Internet / Q000592:standards