Opportunistic Cloud Services: a Social Network Approach to Provisioning and Management of Cloud Computing Services for Enterprises

Research indicates that many organisations tend to underutilise the substantial investments made in IT resources while their counterparts in other parts of the world lack the basic IT resources needed for their production. Making the spare IT resources available to those who need them most has been extremely difficult in the past; but with the advent of cloud computing, this problem should be less difficult to solve. Opportunistic Cloud Services (OCS) is about enterprises leveraging cloud computing technologies to contribute spare IT resources to a platform so that others on the platform can utilise them as and when needed. The OCS network is modelled as a social network of enterprises collaborating strategically in contributing and using cloud services without entering into any business agreements.