Subjective Evaluation of Market-Driven Cloud Services

Abstract

We investigate the use of subjective metrics in social media to evaluate cloud service performance in the market. We first examine the subjective factors that drive cloud consumers to/from purchasing cloud services. These include the ability to achieve greater scalability, security concerns, etc. according to several industry surveys. We then analyse the correlation between the consumers' perception on those factors and the cloud market revenue growth. This paper identifies the unique subjective metrics that are indicative of cloud service performance from the market perspective. The cloud consumers' perception is sourced from several particular social media using sentiment analysis techniques. We focus on consumers' perception on a leading cloud provider that holds the majority of the cloud market share. We find that subjective metrics are empirically proved to be applicable in evaluating the performance of cloud services in the market.