Cloud computing has recently developed as a new model for hosting and delivering services over the Internet. Since the development, the Cloud computing attracts different business owners by way of eliminating the requirement to plan in advance for IT hardware and software acquisition allowing the enterprises to start from scratch and they do not need to increase their resources but only when there is a growth in the service. Regardless of the fact that cloud computing offers huge opportunities to the IT industry and businesses, yet the development of cloud computing technology is currently in the early stages and has many issues to be addressed and researched. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the cloud computing technology pros and cons and its key concepts, from the business perspective as well as presenting all research challenges and security issues, plus identifying all important research directions in this new trend, so a better understanding of this technology will be obtained by enterprises prior to the technology adoption.
Introduction
Computer and IT architecture has developed rapidly and considerably over the last half-century, from the first centric ones to the gradually distributed ones. Special terminals and mainframes were used generally in the market during the 1970s and 1980s. (Dutta, Peng & Choudhary, 2013). In that period of time, Companies used terminals that were just little more than keyboards and monitors to connect to large computer machines called mainframes which hosted in very large rooms and sometimes an entire building to process and store data in order to process their daily digital transactions and to enable their users to share digital information. However, such outdated terminal/mainframe model resulted in a very centralized computing architecture (Dutta et al., 2013). Pprogressively the enormous mainframes were then replaced by reasonably sized servers and stand-alone personal computers, and as a result