Challenges and assessment in migrating IT legacy applications to the cloud

The incessant trend where software engineers need to redesign legacy systems adopting a service-centric engineering approach brings new challenges for software architects and developers. Today, engineering and deploying software as a service requires specific Internet protocols, middleware and languages that often complicate the interoperability of software at all levels. Moreover, cloud computing demands stringent quality requirements, such as security, scalability, and interoperability among others, to provide services and data across networks more efficiently. As software engineers must face the problem to redesign and redeploy systems as services, we explore in this paper the challenges found during the migration of an existing system to a cloud solution and based on a set of quality requirements that includes the vendor Lock-in factor. We also present a set of assessment activities and guidelines to support migration to the Cloud by adopting SOA and Cloud modeling standards and tools.