Factors Influencing the Adoption of Cloud Computing by

INFA 670
FACTORS INFLUENCING THE ADOPTION OF CLOUD COMPUTING BY
THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

A Project Report Presented to the Faculty of
The University of Maryland University College

In partial fulfillment of the provisions for the degree of Masters of Science
In Information Technology

By
Derek A. Smith
For Professor Jeffrey H Bonner,
INFA 670
November 8, 2011

Introduction
The Federal Government has an extensive infrastructure, a broad user base in agencies with a variety of missions, and complex suites of applications. To address these challenges, the Federal CIO Council has charged the government to leverage cloud computing services.
The U.S. Commerce Department 's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has published a draft cloud computing "roadmap” for public comment. NIST fashioned these guidelines to foster federal agencies ' approval of cloud computing, support the private sector, improve the information acquirable to decision makers and help the continuing evolution of the cloud computing model (Brown, 2011) .
Purpose
This paper evaluates the rational for the Federal Government to embrace cloud computing to meet many of their computing needs. The goal is to provide federal administrators’ relevant information to decide whether to use cloud computing to fulfill current and future organizational computational resource demands.
Cloud Computing Background and History
Although Chellappa published original cloud computing research in 1997 (as cited in Mei et al., 2008), acceptance of cloud computing has been reasonably new. This term started to appear regularly in literature around 2006 and refers to computing across the cyberspace (Aymerich et al., 2008). By 2008, cloud computing was realizing rich research interest and had exceeded grid computing in the quantity of media interest experienced (Wang, Tao, et al., 2008; Youseff et al., 2008). Many of the first cloud providers were Web based and start-up companies (Leavitt,

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