Perspectives for moving business processes into the cloud

Abstract

Moving business processes into the cloud means that the business processes are no longer supported on premise but using a set of cloud services. Cloud services allow to highly reduce upfront investments, change to a "pay-asyou- grow" model and to flexibly react to changes in demand. However, to leverage the benefits of cloud services it is necessary to appropriately integrate the definition of cloud services into business process models. Therefore, three perspectives for defining cloud services are introduced. The functional perspective describes clouds services as the exchange of sub-services between service provider and consumer. The non-functional perspective describes cross-cutting, quality oriented properties of the cloud services. Meta-services as third perspective are used to capture functionality beyond the standard operation of a service, e.g. in the case of service failure. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.