Background: Versioning is a product differentiation strategy where a product or service are distinguished or diversified in the intention of making it more attractive to a specific target group. It is often used to price discriminate and a way to profit maximize. Previous studies have mostly concerned software products in general. But with cloud based software products, specific conditions when versioning might occur. E-learning system are one specific software product that shifts more and more to the cloud and a specific market to study. Purpose: Differentiating a software product can be made in several ways but which features to use when versioning is not studied in previous studies, the conditions and reasons are unclear. The purpose of this study is to study cloud based e-learning providers to discover characteristics of feasible features when versioning. Method: To answer the defined research problem qualitative research methods was used in terms of interviews, documentations and observing artefacts. The research data was gathered through four case studies of different cloud e-learning provider, conducting of eight interviewees and four observations of their respective e-learning system. Additionally, articles and other documents was also analysed, that was provided by the companies of the case studies. Delimitations: This research was restricted so it focused on cloud e-learning providers’ perspective as they are those who use the versioning strategy. The limitations therefore only concerns e-learning and cloud services and are not generalized to all software products. Results: The results from the different data collection methods shows that feature characteristics mainly concerns market reasons with specific user preferences and customers with buying behaviors. E-learning systems brings technical reasons to why features are feasible, and the cloud have different service layers, each with different possible features to differentiate in. Costs is also a major concern when choosing feasible features for versioning. Conclusion: E-learning providers see the versioning strategy as an iterative process. Which features that are feasible for one versions seem to change over time as the market changes and product develops. Features are mainly related to the specific market. When versioning, features are separated between standard features for the whole system or segment specific features for one version. Features are also considered if they will add more value than the cost to develop. E-learning providers also develop features if they are economic and technological possible to develop, and if they are within the company’s scope.

With the enormous competition in the industry, organizations must frequently find better ways to embrace organizational learning. This research study advocates eLearning to be one of the best methods for organizational learning, and this is the study’s main area of interest. This research explored a case at a telecommunication organization named ComTek (pseudonym). The research study addressed a problem of eLearning low usage rate, which resulted in ComTek not meeting their set learning targets during the time of the study. The usage rate was measured using the number of enrolled assessments. The study uses qualitative methods to propose a conceptual framework to understand the causes of low eLearning usage. This conceptual framework illustrated the use of the activity theory elements to understand the problem of eLearning low usage, paired with the use of cloud computing services to access eLearning, and the use of content delivery techniques to help understand eLearning low usage. This conceptual framework took advantage of cloud services like Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). This research study focused on the periods from 2016 to 2017 for collecting data and creating an understanding of the research setting, while other data was derived from historical documents about the phenomenon studied. During this period, there was inadequate literature about cloud computing and other aspects to consider within the domain of telecommunication organizations. The literature study, therefore, comprised of literature from different domains. During the study, ComTek used eLearning with the aid of learning management systems (LMS) to manage learning and leverage employee skills. During the period of the study compared to other years, about 50% of assessments had a usage rate of below 80%, a standard target established by ComTek as a benchmark, placing compliance and training at a low rate. Of the 50% of assessments, some were just above 40% in usage rate, were of a high stake, and were in the categories of compliance and training iv assessments. While this was the case, this study did not consider the technical implementation of the application systems involved, and did not create any form of intervention, but focused on understanding the activities that were involved in the learning environment. This research study used a paradigm that was constructive and interpretive in nature, using qualitative methods with the belief that there were multiple realities in understanding the situation at ComTek and possible solutions to it. To unpack the multiple realities, an exploratory case study was conducted as a research approach. In this study, the researcher used multiple data collection methods, including open-ended questionnaires and unstructured interviews. / School of Computing

Den svenska it-politiken har som mål att den offentliga sektorn i Sverige ska bli bäst i världen på att ta tillvara på digitaliseringens möjligheter. Flera studier har påvisat att digitaliseringen av den offentliga sektorn kan gynnas genom en användning av molntjänster. När det talas om den offentliga sektorns molntjänstanvändning åsyftas i regel att en extern molntjänstleverantör tillgängliggör en funktion till användaren som denne vanligtvis hanterar på egen hand. Genom att använda molntjänster för informationshantering överförs uppgifter, däribland möjligtvis även sekretessreglerade sådana, till en molntjänstleverantör. I den här uppsatsen utreds huruvida den offentliga sektorns molntjänstanvändning är förenlig med den svenska sekretesslagstiftningen. Uppsatsen fokuserar på dels röjande av en sekretessreglerad uppgift för en molntjänstleverantör, dels utlämnande av en sekretessreglerad uppgift till en molntjänstleverantör efter en skade- och menprövning. I samband med de ovanstående rättsfrågorna utreds huruvida kryptering av de uppgifter som överförs är en lösning på de rättsliga problem som uppkommer när molntjänster används.

Major cloud service providers have become increasingly popular as the traditional way of storing data locally is turning more and more obsolete. Plenty of large companies have turned to cloud storage which have created business opportunities for the cloud service providers. The cloud service providers have to adapt the availability of their services as well as the security in relationship with the increasing demand of their services. With the growth of these providers, their increased presence in the global internet traffic is a fact as they establish more autonomous systems to increase their availability within the internet topology. This study is based on a couple of these cloud service providers such as Google Cloud, AWS and Microsoft Azure and their growth as well as how they route their data with the BGP protocol in general. A topology was created of how these providers have increased their presence on the internet to see how much of the traffic that goes through their autonomous systems today compared to what it looked like nearly 20 years ago. We have also performed a series of remote traceroutes from different locations around the world and compared the announced path from the BGP protocol to the route that the data actually takes for the same route. It is concluded that the tracerouted path is not always the same as the BGP path, and the reason for that is most likely a companies own routing policy that disrupts the announced path in one way or another.

Small companies and organizations have expressed doubts about using cloud services due to unclear Service Level Agreement (SLA) contracts. These contracts are usually based on security frameworks and measures adapted for data security in general, but not for complex cloud data specifically. The purpose of this study was therefore to compare end users’ opinions of the security measures and security frameworks that were being used for their SLA contracts for cloud services. The study was carried out through semi-structured interviews, thematization, and comparison with earlier research on SLA and cloud security. The result showed that security frameworks on which SLA contracts were based were being used in a too general way by cloud service providers. This made the contracts unclear and not entirely relevant to their own operations. Therefore, the users wanted implementations of security measures that were easier to interpret, well-established and recognized, and relevant to their own operations. The users wanted the security measures to be more detailed by having the cloud service providers divide them into more categories relevant to their particular activities. The users also wanted SLA contracts adapted to their individual needs for cloud security specifically. One conclusion was that frameworks such as ISO, NIST, and COBIT were being used in a too general way for generating cloud service SLAs. Another conclusion was that cloud service security measures should be more specific to users’ own operations and easier to interpret in relation to established frameworks. Cloud service providers could use NIST, ISO, and COBIT to generate more specific measures. One solution would be to automatically generate more specific SLA contracts by auto-selecting established frameworks and well-defined security measures.

With the growth of the internet and exhaustion of IPv4 addresses, the allocation of IP addresses and routing between autonomous systems is an important factor on what paths are taken on the internet. Paths to different destinations are impacted by different neighbouring autonomous systems and their relations with eachother are important in order to find an optimal route from source to destination. In this thesis we look at a longitudinal change of IP observed on the internet that is owned by large organizations. To achieve this we build tools for extracting and parsing data from a dataset from iPlane where we then compare this to the largest domains and cloud providers. From our results we conclude that large domains and cloud providers are found more often as time has passed and they seem to not peer with eachother. We also find that the routing policies within different autonomous systems varies.

Cloud computing innebär användning av datorresurser som är tillgängliga via ett nätverk, oftast Internet och är ett område som har vuxit fram i snabb takt under de senaste åren. Allt fler företag migrerar hela eller delar av sin verksamhet till molnet. Sogeti i Borlänge har behov av att migrera sina utvecklingsmiljöer till en molntjänst då drift och underhåll av dessa är kostsamma och tidsödande. Som Microsoftpartners vill Sogeti använda Microsoft tjänst för cloud computing, Windows Azure, för detta syfte. Migration till molnet är ett nytt område för Sogeti och de har inga beskrivningar för hur en sådan process går till. Vårt uppdrag var att utveckla ett tillvägagångssätt för migration av en IT-lösning till molnet. En del av uppdraget blev då att kartlägga cloud computing, dess beståndsdelar samt vilka för- och nackdelar som finns, vilket har gjort att vi har fått grundläggande kunskap i ämnet. För att utveckla ett tillvägagångssätt för migration har vi utfört flera migrationer av virtuella maskiner till Windows Azure och utifrån dessa migrationer, litteraturstudier och intervjuer dragit slutsatser som mynnat ut i ett generellt tillvägagångssätt för migration till molnet. Resultatet har visat att det är svårt att göra en generell men samtidigt detaljerad beskrivning över ett tillvägagångssätt för migration, då scenariot ser olika ut beroende på vad som ska migreras och vilken typ av molntjänst som används. Vi har dock utifrån våra erfarenheter från våra migrationer, tillsammans med litteraturstudier, dokumentstudier och intervjuer lyft vår kunskap till en generell nivå. Från denna kunskap har vi sammanställt ett generellt tillvägagångssätt med större fokus på de förberedande aktiviteter som en organisation bör genomföra innan migration. Våra studier har även resulterat i en fördjupad beskrivning av cloud computing. I vår studie har vi inte sett att någon tidigare har beskrivit kritiska framgångsfaktorer i samband med cloud computing. I vårt empiriska arbete har vi dock identifierat tre kritiska framgångsfaktorer för cloud computing och i och med detta täckt upp en del av kunskapsgapet där emellan. / Cloud computing involves the use of computer resources that are available through a network, usually the Internet and it is an area that has grown rapidly in recent years. More and more companies move entire or part of their operations to the cloud.Sogeti in Borlänge needs to move their development environments to a cloud service as operating and maintaining of these are costly and time-consuming. As a Microsoft Partner, Sogeti wants to use Microsoft´s services for cloud computing, Windows Azure, for this purpose. Migration to the cloud is a new area for Sogeti and they do not have any descriptions of how this process works.Our mission was to develop an approach for the migration of an IT-solution to the cloud. Part of the mission included the identifying of cloud computing, its components, benefits and drawbacks, which lead to us acquiring basic knowledge of the subject.To develop an approach to migration, we performed several migrations of virtual machines to Windows Azure, and based on these migrations, literature studies and interviews we drew conclusions that resulted in an overall approach for migration to the cloud.The results have shown that it is difficult to make a general but detailed description of an approach to migration, as the scenario looks different depending on what to migrate and what type of cloud service is used. However, based on our experiences from our migrations, along with literature, documents and interviews we have lifted our knowledge to a general level. From this knowledge, we have compiled a general approach with greater focus on the preparatory activities that an organization should implement before migration.Our studies also resulted in an in-depth description of cloud computing. In our studies we did not find previous works in which the critical success factors have been described in the context of cloud computing. In our empirical work, we identified three critical success factors for cloud computing and in doing so covered up some of the knowledge gap in between.

Cloud computing, a current IT trend, is becoming more integrated in companies’ strategies and also increasingly important for firms. Thus, many organizations have or are considering implementing cloud services. Banks, however, tend to not adopt cloud computing at the same pace as other industries. Therefore, it is of interest to increase the understanding of which factors that obstruct or foster an adoption of cloud computing in the banking industry in Sweden. These factors have been examined from a bank and external perspective, through interviews with IT personnel from the four big banks in Sweden, external IT consultants, authorities (Finansinspektionen and Datainspektionen) and Svenska Bankföreningen. The empirical findings have been analyzed in accordance with Tornatzky and Fleischer’s (1990) TOE framework - technology, organization and external task environment. There were eleven key factors found in this study, which are the following: 1) Integration, Lack of competence, Sensitive information, Heritage, Employee resistance, Miscommunication, Size and structure, Common heritage, Standard agreements, New actors and Regulations. 2) All the factors, except New actors, were shown to obstruct and delay an adoption of cloud computing for traditional banks in Sweden. 3) It was found that all these key factors interlink with each other in some sense.

Service Oriented Computing (SOC) provides a framework for the realization of loosely couple service oriented applications (SOA). Web services are central to the concept of SOC. They possess several benefits which are useful to SOA e.g. encapsulation, loose coupling and reusability. Using web services, an application can embed its functionalities within the business process of other applications. This is made possible through web service composition. Web services are composed to provide more complex functions for a service consumer in the form of a value added composite service. Currently, research into how web services can be composed to yield QoS (Quality of Service) optimal composite service has gathered significant attention. However, the number and services has risen thereby increasing the number of possible service combinations and also amplifying the impact of network on composite service performance. QoS-based service composition in the cloud addresses two important sub-problems; Prediction of network performance between web service nodes in the cloud, and QoS-based web service composition. We model the former problem as a prediction problem while the later problem is modelled as an NP-Hard optimization problem due to its complex, constrained and multi-objective nature. This thesis contributed to the prediction problem by presenting a novel learning automata-based non-negative matrix factorization algorithm (LANMF) for estimating end-to-end network latency of a composition in the cloud. LANMF encodes each web service node as an automaton which allows v it to estimate its network coordinate in such a way that prediction error is minimized. Experiments indicate that LANMF is more accurate than current approaches. The thesis also contributed to the QoS-based service composition problem by proposing four evolutionary algorithms; a network-aware genetic algorithm (INSGA), a K-mean based genetic algorithm (KNSGA), a multi-population particle swarm optimization algorithm (NMPSO), and a non-dominated sort fruit fly algorithm (NFOA). The algorithms adopt different evolutionary strategies coupled with LANMF method to search for low latency and QoSoptimal solutions. They also employ a unique constraint handling method used to penalize solutions that violate user specified QoS constraints. Experiments demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of the algorithms in a large scale environment. Also the algorithms outperform other evolutionary algorithms in terms of optimality and calability. In addition, the thesis contributed to QoS-based web service composition in a dynamic environment. This is motivated by the ineffectiveness of the four proposed algorithms in a dynamically hanging QoS environment such as a real world scenario. Hence, we propose a new cellular automata-based genetic algorithm (CellGA) to address the issue. Experimental results show the effectiveness of CellGA in solving QoS-based service composition in dynamic QoS environment.

Molntjänster är idag en modern datateknik för outsourcing av datalagring. Tekniken leder till fördelar som ökad flexibilitet, minskade kostnader och anses minska risker för att förlora viktiga data samt information. Det samarbete som molntjänster innefattar med en extern part i form av en molnleverantör som erhåller molntjänster till företag via en partner medför säkerhetsrisker. Detta i form av förlorad kontroll samt brist på insyn över integritets- och säkerhetsbrister vilket kan ifrågasättas utifrån hur data hanteras. Molntjänster innebär hantering och lagring av data externt, vilket för ett företag kan innebära risker såsom en påverkan på integritet samt säkerhet. Etik innefattar principer för vad som anses vara rätt eller fel vilket skapar ett förhållningssätt för samtliga parter att förhålla sig till. Därav är det av vikt att som molnleverantör i samarbete med partners skapa en transparens för hur företags data hanteras på ett enhetligt sätt.  Studien syftar på att belysa hur företags data i molntjänster hanteras och hur säkerhetsrisker kan uppstå. Genom att identifiera dessa risker kan samtliga parter bidra med ett ansvar för hur säkerhet och integritet fortsätter utvecklas inom molntjänster. / Cloud Computing is a modern technology for outsourcing of data storage. The technology leads to benefits such as increased flexibility, reduced costs and is considered to reduce the risk of losing important data and information. The integration that Cloud Computing depends on with an external Cloud provider that provides the Cloud Service through a partner entails security risk. Such as lost control and lack of transparency over integration and security deficiencies which can be questioned depending on how data is handled. Cloud services involve storage of data externally, which for a company can involve risks such as an impact on the company's integrity and security. Ethics includes principles for what is considered right or wrong and entails an approach for all parties in the entire supply chain of cloud services to adhere to. Therefore, as a cloud provider in collaboration with partners, it is important to create transparency for how company data is handled in a uniform way.  The study aims to shed light on how company data in Cloud services is handled and how security risks may arise. By identifying the risks, all parties can contribute with a responsibility for how security and integrity are maintained within the cloud services.