Cloud computing research for geosciences and applications

Cloud computing provides capabilities and solutions that transcend organizations, jurisdictional boundaries, and continents for many unsolved global challenges in the 21st century (NRC 2011b). However, the eventual success of cloud computing for geospatial sciences will be measured as if cloud computing can speed up geoscience research and improve geospatial application operations from a management perspective by, for example, cost savings (Luftman and Zadeh 2011). A lot of research and development is still needed to enable the solutions from at least the vision, technology, and social aspects (Yang, Xu, and Nebert 2013).