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Organizational implications of a comprehensive approach for cloud-storage sourcing

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Abstract

Cloud-computing facilitates consumers to source online storage-services on a pay-as-you-go basis. The sourcing of storage-as-a-service (STaaS) requires a decision maker to contend with several elements such as pricing structure, application characteristics and quality-of-service requirements, in addition to tactical considerations such as risk propensity and supplier diversification. This makes STaaS sourcing a complex task. Discussion on STaaS sourcing models addressing these aspects and their utility to decision-makers is, however, scant. In this paper, we propose a two-stage holistic approach based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Goal programming (GP). We derive insights provided by these models from 10800 runs using market-based data. We also use an experiment to assess our hypothesis concerning the impact of task complexity on decision-quality. Both these experiments have implications for different business scenarios in the STaaS market, and for decision-making. We discuss these managerial implications, and present a prototype Decision Support System (DSS) to aid STaaS selection.

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Notes

  1. We use the terms bid and offer interchangeably.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management Studies, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, 600036, India

    Venkataraghavan Krishnaswamy & R. P. Sundarraj

Authors
  1. Venkataraghavan Krishnaswamy
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  2. R. P. Sundarraj
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Correspondence to Venkataraghavan Krishnaswamy.

Appendix A

Appendix A

1.1 STaaS Introduction given to Participants

In addition to the data and the decision-problem given in §5, participants were given a brief introduction to STaaS. This introduction is reproduced below.

Storage as a Service (STaaS) is a cloud-computing-based model that provides customers with data storage under a pay-as-you-use pricing scheme. Such a scheme allows for the sourcing of storage in a cost effective manner. Hence, a number of organizations, which used traditional data centers once upon a time, have now switched to this model. In the STaaS model, end-users store data in remote locations managed by storage service providers. Any stored data (e.g., business documents or images) that need to be utilized by the end-user would be accessed or processed through read/write (RW) transactions at the vendor site and then transferred over the network to the end-user. The volume of storage required, the number of RW transactions performed, and the volume of network data transfer may vary across organizations, based on their application portfolio. Today, many service providers have emerged. Therefore, an organization can select from an assortment of vendors that together meet the organization’s requirements in terms of

  • Data storage

  • Network data transfer

  • RW transactions

The total cost of STaaS sourcing consists of the following components:

  • a fixed connection cost (usually costs towards on-call support etc.) and

  • the following variable costs:

    • Storage cost for which there are incremental quantity discounts,

    • Network data transfer costs which again has incremental discounts,

    • Read cost which depend on the number of read transactions,

    • Write costs which depend on the number of write transactions.

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Krishnaswamy, V., Sundarraj, R.P. Organizational implications of a comprehensive approach for cloud-storage sourcing. Inf Syst Front 19, 57–73 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-015-9588-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-015-9588-8

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