Looking merely from the neoclassical perspective, cloud computing is price effective. However, according to institutional and transaction cost economics, cloud customers should estimate other costs beyond the price. Such costs may not be known to cloud customers, leading to unmet expectations and implementation challenges. The aim of this paper is to study transaction costs of cloud computing from the customer perspective to make the cloud journey less cloudy, i.e. more informed and well planned. This paper applies transaction cost theory to cloud computing through a 360-degree industry analysis. Expert interviews with vendor, customer and consultancy sides were conducted to understand costs associated with cloud computing. Findings were validated through a case study. Findings of this research indicate that cloud has high ‘asset specificity’ due to change management costs, meta services costs and business process reengineering costs. Cloud also has a considerable level of ‘uncertainty’ asking for managing contracts, investing in cloud-specific monitoring solutions and consciously reviewing of the legal compliance. Finally, cloud has high ‘transaction frequency’, which compensates for the needed investments triggered by ‘uncertainty’ and ‘asset specificity’.

中文翻译：

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多云交易成本：深入了解云计算经济学

仅从新古典主义的角度来看，云计算是具有成本效益的。但是，根据机构和交易成本经济学，云客户应估算价格以外的其他成本。云客户可能不知道这些成本，从而导致未满足的期望和实施挑战。本文的目的是从客户的角度研究云计算的交易成本，以使云之旅变得不那么混乱，即更明智，计划更周全。本文通过360度行业分析将交易成本理论应用于云计算。与供应商，客户和咨询方进行了专家访谈，以了解与云计算相关的成本。通过案例研究验证了发现。这项研究的发现表明，由于变更管理成本，元服务成本和业务流程再造成本，云具有很高的“资产专用性”。云还具有相当大的“不确定性”，要求管理合同，投资于特定于云的监视解决方案以及自觉地审查法律合规性。最后，云具有很高的“交易频率”，可以补偿由“不确定性”和“资产特异性”触发的所需投资。