ABSTRACT
The chapter acknowledges that a body of literature exists, much of it from service providers and consultants/consultancy companies, which highlights the economic benefits of using cloud services for the storage of digital information. On what basis are these claims made? In particular, what economic models underpin them? The chapter comprehensively identifies primary literature that examines economic models for cloud storage or provides in-depth discussion and/or analysis of pricing and costing of cloud storage services. A critical review of the literature provides an analysis of potential models, their theoretical basis and underlying assumptions, which archives and records professionals can use to inform their decision-making and business case preparation for using such services. Four different financial or management accounting theories, with some variations, underpin the models presented. The chapter explores the use of these economic models by archives and records professionals in practice to estimate and/or predict the medium to longer term cost implications of adopting the cloud for records and what issues of trust arise in making an appropriate decision and/or business case. Finally, the chapter addresses issues of trust in CSPs (cloud service providers) offering IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service), by arguing that trust should be looked upon as a combined socio-technical set of requirements, roles, rules, policies, procedures, best practices, responsibilities, and responsible governance.
