A Decision Process Model to Support Migration to Cloud Computing

Migration to cloud computing is a strategic organisational decision that can affect performance, productivity, growth, as well as increase competitiveness. The decision to migrate is usually complicated and dynamic due to the immaturity and the still evolving nature of the cloud environment. Although there have been many proposed methods for supporting the migration, no systematic decision process exists that clearly identifies the main steps and explicitly describes the tasks to be performed within each step. In this paper, a decision-making process model, based on a two-stage survey, is proposed. The model guides decision makers through a step-by-step approach, aiding them with their decisions for cloud migration. It offers a preliminary structure for developing a cloud knowledge-based decision support system. The model was evaluated by a group of cloud practitioners. The analysis demonstrates a high level of acceptance with regard to the structure, tasks involved and issues addressed by it

Legacy Digital Transformation: TCO and ROI Analysis

Legacy Digital Transformation is modernizing or migrating systems from non-digital or older digital technology to newer digital technologies. Digitalization is essential for information reading, processing, transforming, and storing. Social media, Cloud, and analytics are the major technologies in today\u27s digital world. Digitalization (business process) and Digital Transformation (the effect) are the core elements of newer global policies and processes. Recent COVID pandemic situation, Organizations are willing to digitalize their environment without losing business. Digital technologies help to improve their capabilities to transform processes that intern promote new business models. Applications cannot remain static and should modernize to meet the evolving business and technology needs. Business needs time to market, Agility, and reduce technical debt. Technology needs consist of APIs, better Security, Portability, Scalability, Cloud support, Deployment, Automation, and Integration. This paper elaborates different transformation/modernization approaches for Legacy systems written in very long or End of Life (EOL) systems to newer digital technologies to serve the business needs. EOL impacts application production, supportability, compliance, and security. Organizations spend money and resources on Digital Transformation for considering Investment versus Return on Investment, Agility of the System, and improved business processes. Migration and Modernization are critical for any Legacy Digital Transformation. Management takes decisions to proceed with Digital Transformation for considering Total Cost Ownership (TCO) and Return on Investment (ROI) of the program. The paper also includes a TCO-ROI calculator for Transformation from Legacy / Monolithic to new architectures like Microservices

A Review of the Current Level of Support to Aid Decisions for Migrating to Cloud Computing

© 2016 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Cloud computing provides an innovative delivery model that enables enterprises to reduce operational costs and improve flexibility and scalability. Organisations wishing to migrate their legacy systems to the cloud often need to go through a difficult and complicated decision-making process. This can be due to multiple factors including restructuring IT resources, the still evolving nature of the cloud environment, and the continuous expansion of the services offered. These have increased the requirement for tools and techniques to help the decision-making process for migration. Although significant contributions have been made in this area, there are still many aspects which require further support. This paper evaluates the existing level of support to aid the decision-making process. It examines the complexity of decisions, evaluates the current state of Decision Support Systems in respect of migrating to the cloud, and analyses three models that proposed support for the migration processes. This paper identifies the need for a coherent approach for supporting the whole decision-making process. Further, it explores possible new approaches for addressing the complex issues involved in decision-making for migrating to the cloud

A Holistic Decision Framework to Avoid Vendor Lock-in for Cloud SaaS Migration

Cloud computing offers an innovative business model to enterprise for IT services consumption and delivery. Software as a Service (SaaS) is one of the cloud offerings that attract organisations as a potential solution in reducing their IT cost. However, the vast diversity among the available cloud SaaS services makes it difficult for customers to decide whose vendor services to use or even to determine a valid basis for their selections. Moreover, this variety of cloud SaaS services has led to proprietary architectures and technologies being used by cloud vendors, increasing the risk of vendor lock-in for customers. Therefore, when enterprises interact with SaaS providers within the purview of the current cloud marketplace, they often encounter significant lock-in challenges to migrating and interconnecting cloud. Hence, the complexity and variety of cloud SaaS service offerings makes it imperative for businesses to use a clear and well understood decision process to procure, migrate and/or discontinue cloud services. To date, the expertise and technological solutions to simplify such transition and facilitate good decision making to avoid lock-in risks in the cloud are limited. Besides, little investigation has been carried out to provide a comprehensive decision framework to support enterprises on how to avoid lock-in risks when selecting and implementing cloud-based SaaS solutions within existing environments. Such decision framework is important to reduce complexity and variations in implementation patterns on the cloud provider side, while at the same time minimising potential switching cost for enterprises by resolving integration issues with existing IT infrastructures. This paper proposes a holistic 6-step decision framework that enables an enterprise to assess its current IT landscape for potential SaaS replacement, and provides effective strategies to mitigate vendor lock-in risks in cloud (SaaS) migration. The framework follows research findings and addresses the core requirements for choosing vendor-neutral interoperable and portable cloud services without the fear of vendor lock-in, and architectural decisions for secure SaaS migration. Therefore, the results of this research can help IT managers have a safe and effective migration to cloud computing SaaS environment

The Journey to Serverless Migration: An Empirical Analysis of Intentions, Strategies, and Challenges

Serverless is an emerging cloud computing paradigm that facilitates developers to focus solely on the application logic rather than provisioning and managing the underlying infrastructure. The inherent characteristics such as scalability, flexibility, and cost efficiency of serverless computing, attracted many companies to migrate their legacy applications toward this paradigm. However, the stateless nature of serverless requires careful migration planning, consideration of its subsequent implications, and potential challenges. To this end, this study investigates the intentions, strategies, and technical and organizational challenges while migrating to a serverless architecture. We investigated the migration processes of 11 systems across diverse domains by conducting 15 in-depth interviews with professionals from 11 organizations. we also presented a detailed discussion of each migration case. Our findings reveal that large enterprises primarily migrate to enhance scalability and operational efficiency, while smaller organizations intend to reduce the cost. Furthermore, organizations use a domain-driven design approach to identify the use case and gradually migrate to serverless using a strangler pattern. However, migration encounters technical challenges i.e., testing event-driven architecture, integrating with the legacy system, lack of standardization, and organizational challenges i.e., mindset change and hiring skilled serverless developers as a prominent. The findings of this study provide a comprehensive understanding that can guide future implementations and advancements in the context of serverless migration