InCLOUDer: A Formalised Decision Support Modelling Approach to Migrate Applications to Cloud Environments

An increasing number of organisations want to migrate their existing applications to cloud environments to benefit from the increased scalability, flexibility, and cost reduction. Additionally, systems migrated to cloud environments have to fulfil their functional requirements, satisfy their users' requirements, and meet the organisation's criteria for cloud migration. All these different dimensions driving the migration decision conflict with each other. Therefore, organisations trade them off for one another. Migrating applications to cloud environments becomes a complex decision process for which organisations need assistance. We provide a decision support system to assist organisations by taking into account the formal description of the parameters affecting the cloud migration and our proposed metrics for objective and subjective criteria. Our approach to cloud migration allows organisations to describe their cloud migration criteria, the architecture, properties, and requirements of their applications, and the available cloud service offerings. We semi-automate the migration decision with our transparent formalisations to quantify criteria and constraints.