Trade-off-based adoption methodology for cloud-based infrastructures and services

Abstract

Adoption and consequent management of cloud-based infrastructures and services is driven by business requirements and objectives within an organization. The decision of either to move from a legacy system to a cloud-based system or to move from one cloud solution to another is based on various factors. A potential customer, therefore, should evaluate (a) relevant factors affecting the adoption of a cloud and (b) impacts cloud services will have on multi-faceted objectives of an organization. Existing methods for such an adoption process do not evaluate these two aspects for the decision of cloud adoption. Thus, this paper fills this gap by introducing a new Trade-off-based Adoption methodology for Cloud-based Infrastructures and Services (TrAdeCIS), which is based on the impact cloud-based services will have on the organization. This methodology developed will support organizations in decisions concerning (a) the selection of cloud service provider, (b) the type of cloud service to be adopted, and (c) the suitable type of cloud to be adopted. TrAdeCIS is illustrated based on a survey conducted with 10 organizations, who have adopted or plan to adopt cloud-based solution to fulfil their advanced IT requirements. © 2014 International Federation for Information Processing.