A scoring method based on criteria matching for cloud computing provider ranking and selection

Abstract

Cloud computing has become a successful service model for hosting and elastic on demand distribution of computing resources all around the world, using the Internet. This cornerstone paradigm has been adopted and incorporated not only in all major known service providers IT companies (e.g., Google, Amazon, etc.), but also triggered a competitive race at the creation of new companies as providers of cloud computing services. Although this increase on the companies offering cloud computing services is beneficial to the client, on the other hand it challenges the clients’ ability to choose among those companies the most suitable to attend their requirements. Therefore, this work proposes a logical/mathematical scoring method to be used to rank and select among several cloud computing provider candidates the most appropriate to the user. This method is based on the analysis of several criteria comprising performance indicators values required by the user and associated with every cloud computing provider that is able to attend the user’s requirements. The proposed method is composed of a three stages algorithm that evaluates, scores, sorts and selects different cloud providers based on the utility of their performance indicators according to the values of the performance indicators required by the users. In order to illustrate the proposed method’s operation, example of its utilization is provided.