A fad or future of IT?: A comprehensive literature review on the cloud computing research

• We’ve examined the development and evolution of cloud computing research through the content analysis of articles, which were published between 2009 and 2014.
• The results indicate that the majority of the cloud computing research is about the “cloud computing adoption” (19%), and “legal & ethical issues” of cloud computing (15%).
• “Benefits & challenges of cloud computing” (5%) and “energy consumption dimension of cloud computing” (4%) are the least attention-grabbing themes in the literature.
• Finally, it is found that the majority of the articles were published by engineering, information systems or technical journals. This topic is generally ignored by the managerial journals even though the impact of cloud computing on organizations is immense.

Cloud computing is now a global trend and during the past decade, has drawn attention from both academic and business communities. Although the evolution of cloud computing has not reached the maturity level, there is still adequate research about the topic. The main purpose of this paper is to examine the development and evolution of cloud computing over time. A content analysis was conducted for 236 scholarly journal articles, which were published between 2009 and 2014 in order to (i) identify the possible trends and changes in cloud computing over the six years, (ii) compare publishing productivity of journals about the cloud computing subject, and (iii) guide future research about cloud computing. The results show that the majority of the cloud computing research is about “cloud computing adoption” (19%), and it was followed by the “legal and ethical issues” of cloud computing (15%). It is also found that “cloud computing for mobile applications” (6%), “benefits & challenges of cloud computing” (5%) and “energy consumption dimension of cloud computing” (4%) are the least attention-grabbing themes in the literature. However, “cloud computing for mobile applications” and “energy consumption dimension of cloud computing” themes have become popular in the last two years, so they are expected to be trendy topics of the near future. Finally, another finding of this study is that the majority of the articles were published by engineering, information systems or technical journals such as “IT Professional Magazine”, “International Journal of Information Management” and “Mobile Networks and Applications”. It seems as if this topic is generally ignored by the managerial and organizational journals even though the impact of cloud computing on organizations and institutions is immense and is in need of investigation.