Cloudy transaction costs: a dive into cloud computing economics Looking merely from the neoclassical perspective, cloud computing is price effective. However, according to institutional and transaction cost economics, cloud customers should estimate other costs beyond the price. Such costs may not be known to cloud customers, leading to unmet expectations and implementation challenges. The aim of this paper is to study transaction costs of cloud computing from the customer perspective to make the cloud journey less cloudy, i.e. more informed and well planned. This paper applies transaction cost theory to cloud computing through a 360degree industry analysis. Expert interviews with vendor, customer and consultancy sides were conducted to understand costs associated with cloud computing. Findings were validated through a case study. Findings of this research indicate that cloud has high xe2x80x98asset specificityxe2x80x99 due to change management costs, meta services costs and business process reengineering costs. Cloud also has a considerable level of xe2x80x98uncertaintyxe2x80x99 asking for managing contracts, investing in cloudspecific monitoring solutions and consciously reviewing of the legal compliance. Finally, cloud has high xe2x80x98transaction frequencyxe2x80x99, which compensates for the needed investments triggered by xe2x80x98uncertaintyxe2x80x99 and xe2x80x98asset specificityxe2x80x99.

On the Cost of the Management of user Applications in a Multicloud Environment Multicloud solutions are becoming increasingly popular among enterprises and, today, it is easy to find organizations that use resources and services belonging to two or more cloud providers. It is wellknown that the adoption of a multicloud infrastructure provides several advantages: it limits vendor lockin andor dependence on a single provider, enables cost reduction, grants the access to a wide variety of services and computational resources and allows the exploitation of the geographical location of the servers (e.g., to be consistent with data compliance policies). These advantages, however, have a cost in terms of greater complexity in resourcesu0027 configuration and management: e.g., security policies have to be adapted and made consistent among all the different cloud providers. This complexity implies that most of the companies that use a multicloud infrastructure manage the resources belonging to different providers as independent and autonomous, exploiting only a portion of the advantages that could be benefited if those resources were used in an integrated and optimized way. In this paper, we will describe and discuss some of the aspects related to the internetworking among resources belonging to multiple providers, a necessary and fundamental step towards a strong integration among different clouds.