ABSTRACT
Many institutions and companies are moving rapidly to adopt cloud computing, a term that refers to accessing Information and Communications Technology (ICT) services across the Internet. e computers and soware applications are housed on Web servers in large industrial-scale computing centers rather than provided locally. e rst bene t of these commercial “computing utilities” is that they can harvest the economies of scale and oer services at a fee that is far lower than most organizations would require to implement and maintain their own computing infrastructure. To lower energy costs, cloud providers locate their data centers near power generation facilities; to lower sta costs per machine, cloud providers install vast numbers of computers in each server farm. Many institutions already bene t from these economies of scale by outsourcing e-mail to Google or Microso.
