Cloud Migration Process

Case Study on Business Migration Process to the Cloud

Lukasz Ostrowski

, Markus Helfert

and Huanhuan Xhiong

School of Computing, Dublin City University, Glasnevin, Dublin, Ireland

Cloud Computing Research Centre, Dublin City University, Glasnevin, Dublin, Ireland

Keywords: Cloud Computing, Design Science, Cloud Migration Process.

Abstract: Cloud computing has become a trend in the Information Systems (IS) field and provides an interesting

prospect for the Information Technology (IT) industry. Main reasons why business are moving into the

cloud is due to the opportunity for costs reduction, flexibility, and high automation. However, moving all

business data into the cloud raises some security concerns. Hence, our work is to determine a business

process for migration businesses to the cloud that adds transparency and clarify ambiguities of this move to

small-medium business holders. In this paper we describe our approach to design a migration process for

small-medium enterprises, therefore following process-oriented reference model in design science research.

We present the migration process and underline various migration options and proven methods to increase

its adaptation to business.

1 INTRODUCTION

Cloud computing describes a general movement

within the IT industry towards delivering

computational and storage capacities as services,

with the facility to increase, or decrease capacity

dynamically to match usage needs. This paradigm

presents an attractive business model, allowing

consumers to share the investment in infrastructure

necessary to achieve their IT requirements. There

are five essential characteristics in cloud computing:

on-demand self-service, broad network access,

resource pooling, rapid elasticity and measured

service (Mell and Grance, 2011). There are many

reasons why businesses are increasingly moving to

the cloud, such as reduced costs, agility, flexibility,

highly automated, and quality (Grossman, 2009).

Cloud computing has become a hugely popular

topic, many of the globe’s largest technology

providers look to cloud as a selling point for their

hardware and software products. It is clear that cloud

computing is a very important technological

development; a lot of companies have started to use

it in earnest, and will do so increasingly for the

foreseeable future. Thus, strategies for migrating

business to the cloud are of huge importance.

Unfortunately, given the complexities of even the

simplest business models, this is not an easy task. It

can hinder small-medium enterprises from accessing

the opportunities of the cloud which has a lot to

offer. Thus, the knowledge on how to migrate to the

cloud is a significant problem for the small and

medium-size enterprises (Ambrust et al., 2010).

The reminder of this paper is organized as

follows. We present our research methodology based

on the process-oriented reference model (Ostrowski

and Helfert, 2012). Then, the migration process is

outlined.

2 DESIGN SCIENCE

Design science focuses on creations of artificial

systems. It addresses research through the building

and evaluation of artefacts designed to meet

identified business needs (Hevner et al., 2004).

Design is proposed as a research strategy to gain

knowledge and understanding about the object under

construction. Artefacts are understood as entities that

have some separate existence (Goldkuhl, 2004). In

our research, the artefact is a business process of

migrating business models to the cloud. Hence, we

built our artefact by following process-oriented

reference model that guides design science

researchers aiming at artefacts in a form of business

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Ostrowski L., Helfert M. and Xhiong H..

Cloud Migration Process - Case Study on Business Migration Process to the Cloud.

DOI: 10.5220/0004362301190122

In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER-2013), pages 119-122

ISBN: 978-989-8565-52-5

 2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

processes. Figure 1 illustrates the reference model in

the design science settings.

Figure 1: Overview of the Process Oriented Reference

Model in Design Science Research (Ostrowski and

Helfert, 2012).

3 THE MIGRATION PROCESS

The following case study describes the application

of the above research methodology. In the period of

6 months, we have constructed a consolidated

process and supporting methods to the migration of

business models to the cloud. During the course of

the research, we have applied the process oriented

reference model.

The identification of process migration problem

started due to requirements of an industrial research

project. The research project was supposed to

develop an application hosting scenarios range from

on-premise solutions to private and public clouds for

small and medium enterprises. In this context it

became evident that a consolidated process of

migration business models to the cloud was needed.

Thus, the first idea for the research problem came

from industry requirements.

Business migration to the cloud can be

understood and approached from various angles.

According to the Cloud Business Model Framework

(Weinhardt et al., 2009), our migration process

considers the migration at the platforms in the cloud

layer. This layer distinguishes between development

and business platforms. The former enables

developers to write the applications and upload their

code into the cloud. The latter enables the

development, deployment and management of

tailored business applications in the cloud. Our

migration process focuses on the latter where

development of the business cloud applications is in

close cooperation with the cloud provider. At the

high level the migration process consists of four

activities: Plan, Development, Deployment, and

Post-deployment (Figure 2).

Figure 2: The high level view of the migration process.

3.1 Plan

The main goal of the Plan phase is to understand the

business model and determine if the cloud make

sense to the business and what impact the cloud may

have on it. This is usually carried out by business

analysts and industry experts. Their work covers

three stages: assessment, analysis and planning of

the process migration. These stages are optional

components, which can be used in parallel to

produce the foundation for migration. In the

following subsections we describe them in more

detail.

3.1.1 Assessment

The goal of the assessment stage is to select and

determine applications and processes in which they

are involved for the migration purpose. The stage

consists of four consecutive activities. Firstly those

applications that exist within the business are

identified, and those that are not suitable, in general,

for migration are eliminated. Secondly, applications

that are external to the business process are

Identify Problem

and Objectives of

Solution

Literature

Review

Process

Modelling

Collaboration

with

Practitioners

Process

Synthesis

Evaluation

Communication

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identified and partitioned from those that are solely

internal to the business process. Next, evaluation of

feasibility of the selected applications to the cloud is

undertaken. The evaluation is carried out from three

perspectives: business: What is the business benefit

of migration this application to the cloud? technical:

How technically feasible is it to move this

application to the cloud? risk: What risk is involved

in moving this application to the cloud?

During the evaluation, there are different

methods for making decisions or ranking the scores

of assessment result, such as analytic hierarchy

process (AHP), multi-criteria decision analysis

(MCDA), solution alignment workshop (SAW).

Finally these results are fed into an assessment result

document. This document is tailored for the specific

business process involved.

3.1.2 Analysis

The analysis stage involves understanding the

customer’s business requirement and analysing those

requirements from several perspectives: cost,

benefits, time, and strategy.

The aim of this stage is to get the deep

knowledge about the way the business operates and

how the business works. This is achieved by running

workshops with each organization units to

comprehend their daily work-flow, and determine

how migration can fit in. The outcome of the

analysis activity is a blue-print of the business

processes along with possible solutions that the

cloud provider has to offer. This enables the

business to determine their detailed requirements.

3.1.3 Planning

This stage can be viewed from two perspectives:

success criteria and capability. The success criteria

define what a successful migration looks like, while

the capability defines what the technical

requirements are for a successful migration.

For a successful migration the success criteria

must cover: metrics, milestones, type of migration

and its manual and automated parts. There are also

capability perspectives that determine: the types of

technology needed to achieve a successful

migration, required skills and tools, how to leverage

existing knowledge within the company.

After the planning stage, both parties are clear

about the deliverables and the agreed time-frame

illustrates how the cloud provider will interact with

the on-going business.

3.2 Development

At this phase the cloud applications and technical

environment for the business scenarios to move to

the cloud are developed. During the development,

varieties of tests are performed, such as

functionality, unit testing, and user scenarios that

checks how the infrastructure handles the business

scenarios. These tests ensure data integrity across

the business processes.

Generally, we can distinguish six stages of the

development process through which each cloud

application goes. These are described below.

Developing Business Architecture. At this stage

the Cloud provider tries to accommodate the work

environment and the current core technology of the

business to accommodate business scenario in cloud

environment. The idea is to keep as much of the

business infrastructure including the applications

working with sensitive data and business processes

intact.

Building Cloud Infrastructure. The key part of

this stage is to map Cloud architectural environment

to business scenarios and processes. The

environment may include network design, directory

design, messaging topology, application topology,

development methodology, development process,

and operations process.

Developing the Cloud Technical Environment.

At this stage, the cloud provider installs the technical

solutions and cloud applications for each component

of cloud infrastructure, such as the net-available

bandwidth for network, the authorization or identity

management software for directory, antivirus

applications for messaging system, database servers

for data exchange and storage.

Testing and validating each Migrated

Component. After installing and configuring the

software, the next stage is to run the simple initial

test that validates the software installation and

functionality. Its goals are to verify the Cloud

components meet requirements.

Attaining Client approval. To attain business

approval, the Cloud provider generates a set of

reports of the performance and Quality of the Cloud

Service (QoS). These reports show the outcome of

the testing stage and describe each migrated

component.

Milestones. This refers to the state when one

functional part of the business has been migrated

successfully, and the business can start make use of

it. At the same time, it gives the Cloud provider a

closed case which they can refer as a wok well done

for future reference (e.g. white papers).

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3.3 Deployment

After developing the cloud applications and

technical environment, the cloud provider is ready to

move a business component to the cloud. This

usually involves plugging the application to the

business database. There are three main aspects to be

considered here: specification of the plugged cloud

application, a data backup, and documentation of the

migration.

3.4 Post-deployment

Most cloud providers claim that their cloud products

are user-centric or customer-oriented, which means

customer satisfaction is one of the key

considerations. Ensuring that customer receives

value for money and their satisfaction with the

product is decent are the main goals of post-

deployment. Generally, Cloud providers combine

questionnaire (manual method) and monitoring

metrics (automated method) to measure or evaluate

customer satisfaction, which can help to improve the

quality of services and usage rate.

In terms of monitoring metrics, cloud providers

offer their customers monitoring services or

applications in order to help them to maximize the

utilization of cloud products and resources. The

automated tools can generate advanced reports to

visualize and monitor resource utilization, which can

help to improve user experience, as well as customer

satisfaction. The goal is to ensure the businesses that

they pay for what they have used.

5 CONCLUSIONS

In this paper we presented a process of migration

business to the cloud based on insights gathered

from IT Cloud consultants and IT cloud solutions

providers. By business we understood small and

medium enterprises (SMEs) willing and being

suitable to move their business components to the

cloud. The business process is addressed to SMEs

that are the users of the cloud applications rather

than providers of IT solutions to the cloud.

The process also demonstrates a successful

application of the process–oriented reference model

in design science settings.

Further research could look into the

infrastructure and application layers of the cloud

migration. The migration process for IT business

solution providers differs significantly from the IT

business users which we presented in this paper. IT

would be also beneficial to have a set of methods

that could help maintain and encourage

collaboration with practitioners for the research

purposes in for the long term.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was supported by the Irish Research

Council for Science, Engineering and Technology

under the Enterprise Partnership Scheme and Irish

Centre for Cloud Computing and Commerce.

REFERENCES

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Goldkuhl, G., 2004. Design Theories in Information

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59-72.

Grossman, R., 2009. The Case of Cloud Computing. IT

Professional, 11(2), pp. 23-27.

Hevner, A., March, S., Park, J. & Ram, S., 2004. Design

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Quarterly, Volume 28, pp. 75-106.

Mell, P. & Grance, T., 2011. The NIST Definition of Cloud

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Ostrowski, L. & Helfert, M., 2012. Reference Model in

Design Science Research to Gather and Model

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Weinhardt, C. et al., 2009. Cloud Computing – A

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Directions. Business & Information Systems

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