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

An increasing number of companies make use of Cloud Computing services in order to reduce costs and increase flexibility of their IT infrastructure. This has enlivened a debate on the benefits and risks of Cloud Computing, among both practitioners and researchers. This study applies quantitative content analysis to explore the Cloud Computing ecosystem. The analyzed data comprises high quality research articles and practitioner-oriented articles from magazines and web sites. We apply n-grams and the cluster algorithm k-means to analyze the literature. The contribution of this paper is twofold: First, it identifies the key terms and topics that are part of the Cloud Computing ecosystem which we aggregated to a comprehensive model. Second, this paper discloses the sentiments of key topics as reflected in articles from both practice and academia.