Cloud Migration Research: A Systematic Review

Background--By leveraging cloud services, organizations can deploy their software systems over a pool of resources. However, organizations heavily depend on their business-critical systems, which have been developed over long periods. These legacy applications are usually deployed on-premise. In recent years, research in cloud migration has been carried out. However, there is no secondary study to consolidate this research. Objective--This paper aims to identify, taxonomically classify, and systematically compare existing research on cloud migration. Method--We conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) of 23 selected studies, published from 2010 to 2013. We classified and compared the selected studies based on a characterization framework that we also introduce in this paper. Results--The research synthesis results in a knowledge base of current solutions for legacy-to-cloud migration. This review also identifies research gaps and directions for future research. Conclusion--This review reveals that cloud migration research is still in early stages of maturity, but is advancing. It identifies the needs for a migration framework to help improving the maturity level and consequently trust into cloud migration. This review shows a lack of tool support to automate migration tasks. This study also identifies needs for architectural adaptation and self-adaptive cloud-enabled systems.