A Taxonomy for Cloud Storage Cost

Abstract

The cost of using cloud storage services is complex and often an unclear structure, while it is one of the important factors for organisations adopting cloud storage. Furthermore, organisations take advantage of multi-cloud or hybrid solutions to combine multiple public and/or private cloud service providers to avoid vendor lock-in, achieve high availability and performance, optimise cost, etc. This complicated ecosystem makes it even harder to understand and manage cost. Therefore, in this paper, we provide a taxonomy of cloud storage cost in order to provide a better understanding and insights on this complex problem domain.