Towards a framework for describing cloud service characteristics for use by chief information officers

This paper reports the first steps of work undertaken by a consortium of commercial and academic institutions to describe and share cloud service characteristics for use by consumer organizations, and in particular by the chief information officers of these organizations to manage their portfolios of cloud services. It describes a model of cloud service characteristics, focusing on qualities associated with the service and the important associations between service characteristics necessary to generate claims about the goodness or otherwise of a service. It presents several examples of measures, metrics and indicators specified to describe different types of cloud service characteristic included in the model. The paper ends with a description of future work, to make cloud service data and information available to a wider community of service consumers and organizations.