Understanding the Cloud Computing Ecosystem: Results from a Quantitative Content Analysis

Abstract

An increasing number of companies make use of CloudComputing services in order to reduce costs and increaseflexibility of their IT infrastructure. This has enlivened a debateon the benefits and risks of Cloud Computing, among bothpractitioners and researchers. This study applies quantitativecontent analysis to explore the Cloud Computing ecosystem. Theanalyzed data comprises high quality research articles andpractitioner-oriented articles from magazines and web sites. Weapply n-grams and the cluster algorithm k-means to analyze theliterature. The contribution of this paper is twofold: First, itidentifies the key terms and topics that are part of the CloudComputing ecosystem which we aggregated to a comprehensivemodel. Second, this paper discloses the sentiments of key topicsas reflected in articles from both practice and academia.