“On-demand” pricing and capacity management in cloud computing

In recent business practice, firms, to fulfill their IT requirements, are using both dedicated “on-premise” capacity infrastructure and “on-demand” capacity requirements provided by companies such as AWS, OpenStack, and VMware. In this research, we analyze the scenario where a business first invests in “on-premise” (or in-house) capacity and also procures the excess demand requirements through the public cloud provider utilizing the pay-as-you-go pricing model. We study the impact of factors such as demand correlation in buyers’ market and demand load profile on the capacity decision. We find various cloud computing strategies and link them with real-life business practices.