A Case for Cooperative Cloud Intermediaries for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises

Cloud computing is a new and increasingly popular form of IT outsourcing. It implies that a cloud service provider offers very standardized abstract IT services which are accessed by a user over the Internet. While cloud services are supposed to be very beneficial for small and medium-sized enterprises, the adoption of such services has been low in this group, among other reasons because of high complexity of the cloud market and trust concerns. This paper motivates the notion of cooperative cloud intermediaries as a solution for these concerns by building on well-known concepts: transaction cost theory, agency theory, the notion of intermediaries in electronic markets and the cooperative paradigm. We derive our solution in detail and show its viability in theory.