to obtain “ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources” (Mell and Grance 2011, p. 2) Four deployment models: (Mell and Grance 2011) private cloud: resources used exclusively by one organization public cloud: resources shared by all organizations opting to participate community cloud: similar to public cloud but used only be a defined group of organizations hybrid cloud: a combined use of at least two of the previous models Product Lifecycle Used to define the lifecycle of products in a marketplace (Vernon 1966) Consists of four stages: Introduction Stage, Growth Stage, Maturity or Stabilization Stage, and Decline Stage (Cox 1967; Rink and Swan 1979)