| Summary: | Context: Cloud Computing is a very fascinating concept these days, it is attracting so many organiza-tions to move their utilities and applications into a dedicated data centers, and so it can be accessed from the Internet. This allows the users to focus solely on their businesses while Cloud Computing providers handle the technology. Choosing a best provider is a challenge for organizations that are willing to step into the Cloud Computing world. A single cloud center generally could not deliver large scale of resources for the cloud tenants; therefore, multiple cloud centers need to collaborate to achieve some business goals and to provide the best possible services at lowest possible costs. How-ever a number of aspects, legal issues, challenges, and policies should be taken into consideration when moving our service into the Cloud environment. Objectives: The aim of this research is to identify and elaborate the major technical and strategy differences between the cloud-computing providers in order to enable the organizations managements, system designers and decision makers to have better insight into the strategies of the different Cloud Computing providers. It is also to understand the risks and challenges due to implementing Cloud Computing, and “how” those issues can be moderated. This study will try to define Multi-Cloud Computing by studying the pros and cons of this new domain. It is also aiming to study the concept of load balancing in the cloud in order to examine the performance over multiple cloud environments. Methods: In this master thesis a number of research methods are used, including the systematic litera-ture review, contacting experts from the relevant field (Interviews) and performing a quantitative methodology (Experiment). Results: Based on the findings of the Literature Review, Interviews and Experiment, we got out the results for the research questions as, 1) A comprehensive study for identifying and comparing the major Cloud Computing providers, 2) Addressing a list of impacts of Cloud Computing (legal aspects, trust and privacy). 3) Creating a definition for Multi-Cloud Computing and identifying the benefits and drawbacks, 4) Finding the performance results on the cloud environment by performing an expe-riment on a load balancing solution. Conclusions: Cloud Computing becomes a central interest for many organizations nowadays. More and more companies start to step into the Cloud Computing service technologies, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, SalesForce, and Rackspace are the top five major providers in the market today. However, there is no Cloud that is perfect for all services. The legal framework is very important for the protection of the user’s private data; it is an important key factor for the safety of the user’s personal and sensitive information. The privacy threats vary according to the nature of the cloud scenario, since some clouds and services might face a very low privacy threats compare to the others, the public cloud that is accessed through the Internet is one of the most means when it comes the increasing threats of the privacy concerns. Lack of visibility of the provider supply chain will lead to suspicion and ultimately distrust. The evolution of Cloud Computing shows that it is likely, in a near future, the so-called Cloud will be in fact a Multi-cloud environment composed of a mixture of private and public Clouds to form an adaptive environment. Load balancing in the Cloud Computing environment is different from the typical load balancing. The architecture of cloud load balancing is using a number of commodity servers to perform the load balancing. The performance of the cloud differs depending on the cloud’s location even for the same provider. HAProxy load balancer is showing positive effect on the cloud’s performance at high amount of load, the effect is unnoticed at lower amounts of load. These effects can vary depending on the location of the cloud.
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