This document defines the quality model of cloud services.

The quality model of cloud services is composed of nine characteristics (some of which are further subdivided into subcharacteristics), which provide consistent terminology for specifying, measuring and evaluating cloud services so that the stakeholders, cloud service customer (CSC), cloud service provider (CSP) and cloud service partner (CSN) have a common understanding.

Since the quality model in this document is the extension to the existing quality models defined in ISO/IEC 2501n, it can be used with the product quality model, IT service quality model, data quality model, and quality-in-use model according to evaluation purposes. As there are several cloud service categories, this document focuses on the quality model of SaaS (Software as a Service).

NOTE       Future documents are intended to address PaaS (Platform as a Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service).