Business and Industry Specific Cloud: Challenges and opportunities

• This is an extended editorial for a special section on Business and Industry Specific Cloud.
• Examples of industry-specific offerings by different vendors are overviewed.
• Some application case studies are reviewed.
• Four special section papers are introduced.
• The challenges and opportunities ahead are summarised.

This guest editorial highlights the current move by many cloud providers to business and industry-specific cloud. We summarise the latest happenings and provide examples of business and industry-specific needs by considering some case study reports and related research. We introduce four new special section papers, which further elaborate on issues and solutions relevant to business and industry-specific cloud. Finally we summarise the challenges and opportunities ahead for researchers and developers.