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Cloud storage cost: a taxonomy and survey

Abstract

Cloud service providers offer application providers with virtually infinite storage and computing resources, while providing cost-efficiency and various other quality of service (QoS) properties through a storage-as-a-service (StaaS) approach. Organizations also use multicloud or hybrid solutions by combining multiple public and/or private cloud service providers to avoid vendor lock-in, achieve high availability and performance, and optimise cost. Indeed cost is one of the important factors for organizations while adopting cloud storage; however, cloud storage providers offer complex pricing policies, including the actual storage cost and the cost related to additional services (e.g., network usage cost). In this article, we provide a detailed taxonomy of cloud storage cost and a taxonomy of other QoS elements, such as network performance, availability, and reliability. We also discuss various cost trade-offs, including storage and computation, storage and cache, and storage and network. Finally, we provide a cost comparison across different storage providers under different contexts and a set of user scenarios to demonstrate the complexity of cost structure and discuss existing literature for cloud storage selection and cost optimization. We aim that the work presented in this article will provide decision-makers and researchers focusing on cloud storage selection for data placement, cost modelling, and cost optimization with a better understanding and insights regarding the elements contributing to the storage cost and this complex problem domain.
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Category

Academic article

Language

English

Author(s)

  • Akif Quddus Khan
  • Mihhail Matskin
  • Radu Prodan
  • Christoph Bussler
  • Titi Roman
  • Ahmet Soylu

Affiliation

  • SINTEF Digital / Sustainable Communication Technologies
  • Royal Institute of Technology
  • University of Klagenfurt (AAU)
  • Norwegian University of Science and Technology
  • OsloMet - Oslo Metropolitan University
  • USA

Year

2024

Published in

World wide web (Bussum)

ISSN

1386-145X

Volume

27

Issue

4

View this publication at Norwegian Research Information Repository