Cloud portability standardization overview

With the development of various cloud technologies and their increased usage, the newly arisen challenge is the migration of a cloud-based application and data among various cloud environments and vendors. In the absence of a standardised mean by which full portability can be achieved, various tools exist in the form of APIs, standards, and protocols. In this paper we conduct an overview of the state of the art regarding the topic of migration and portability of cloud-based applications, in order to determine the possible challenges that today's technologies might have, as well as to find the most appropriate automated way to port an application from one to another cloud, or to migrate an on-premise application to the cloud.