Mining the E-commerce cloud: A survey on emerging relationship between web mining, E-commerce and cloud computing

In recent years, due to the rapid advances in Information and Communications Technology (ICT), it is generally perceived that computing will one day become the 5th utility (after water, electricity, telephony and gas). This computing utility will offer the basic level of computing service that can be considered essential to meet the everyday needs of the general community. A new model of computing called cloud computing is transforming computing to a model consisting of services that are treated as commodities and delivered in a manner like the traditional utilities. In this model, the services are accessed by the user based on their requirements without the knowledge of the place where these services are hosted or how these services are delivered. The data mining when offered in cloud computing environment allows e-commerce organizations a centralised management of software and data storage, with assurance of efficient, reliable and secure services for their users thus achieving maximized profit and cutting costs in different possible ways. In this paper we discuss how cloud computing is changing the computing scenario and how Web data mining can be used in cloud computing by the e-commerce organizations to reduce setup costs and maximize return on investments.