Master's Thesis from the year 2012 in the subject Computer Science - Commercial Information Technology, grade: 2.0, University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg; Rheinbach, language: English, abstract: Cloud computing is gaining importance in the industry and specially within small and medium-sized companies due to the many benefits in terms of cost savings, faster time to market, scalability, cost flexibility and optimization of resources. Today, cloud computing is considered as the next IT revolution and the number of articles, books, papers and technical reports flood the literature. Within the scope of this master thesis, relevant cloud computing applications for small- and medium- sized companies are identified and the key success factors for adoption of cloud computing services are analyzed based on the empirical investigation performed as part of this work. Finally, the benefits and constraints of the different cloud computing service models are presented including also the state-of-the-art research in the cloud computing area and a summary of the most important results.