Cloud Computing: The Emergence of Application Service Providers (ASPs) in Developing Economies

Abstract — The Cloud Computing paradigm has triggered a major shake-up in the way ICT infrastructure is delivered, priced and consumed. The underlying factors for this phenomenon are highly abstracted or virtualized infrastructure, a variable OPEX-based model (determined by usage requirements), support for multi-tenant user model and immediate computing resource scalability. This paper provides an insight into the Cloud computing eco-system in a developing economy, with Ghana as case example. It reveals that there is positive experience with this computing model from the consumer standpoint. It also reveals that virtualization, which has been identified to be the stepping stone to full Cloud services, is in demand. Hybrid deployment models also represent an opportunity area due to the paucity of deployed instances