Emerging Issues & Challenges in Cloud Computing—A Hybrid Approach

As cloud computing continues to gain more momentum in the IT industry, more issues and challenges are being reported by academics and practitioners. In this paper, we aim to attain an understanding of the types of issues and challenges that have been emerging over the past five years and identify gaps between the focus of the literature and what practitioners deem important. A systematic literature review as well as interviews with experts have been conducted to answer our research questions. Our findings suggest that researchers have been mainly focusing on issues related to security and privacy, infrastructure, and data management. Interoperability across different service providers has also been an active area of research. Despite the significant overlap between the topics being discussed in the literature and the issues raised by the practitioners, our findings show that some issues and challenges that practitioners consider important are understudied such as software related issues, and challenges pertaining to learning fast-evolving technologies.