ABSTRACT
The global cloud market has recently increased dramatically due to the Covid-19 pandemic. In such situation, people are looking for flexibility to work from home without going to the office physically and hence many organizations have started to look for a cloud-based solution. Clearly, Cloud not only offers flexibility, but also provides scalability and availability to an organization especially for startups and SMEs which have not established a firm and stable architecture yet. Hence, this paper aims to provide a better understanding on the model, features, and services to select the most suitable cloud platform based on the objectives or requirements of an organization. Finally, potential challenges of cloud development are also described to assist organizations in deploying cloud as a service in order to make a wise decision beforehand as it would be a long-run processes. © 2021 IEEE.