Cloud Computing Adoption, Cost-beneﬁt Relationship and Strategies for

Selecting Providers: A Systematic Review

Antonio Carlos Marcelino de Paula and Glauco de Figueiredo Carneiro

Salvador University (UNIFACS), Salvador - Bahia, Brazil

Keywords:

Cloud Computing, Cloud Migration, Provider Selection, Cost-beneﬁt Relationship, Systematic Literature

Review.

Abstract:

Context: Cloud computing has been one of the most promising computing paradigms in industry to provide

a customizable and resourceful platform to deploy software. There are a number of competing providers and

available services that allows organizations to access computing services without owning the corresponding

infrastructure. Goal: Identify the main characteristics of opportunities to migrate to the cloud, the respective

challenges and difﬁculties as well as factors that affect the cost-beneﬁt relationship of such adoption. Method:

This paper presents a systematic literature review to compare reported strategies of organizations to migrate

and adopt cloud computing and their perception of the cost-beneﬁt of this adoption. Results: The overall

data collected from these studies depicts that a signiﬁcant part of the companies perceived inclination towards

for the innovation adoption process inﬂuenced by technological, organizational and environmental contexts.

Conclusion: Due to the variety of strategies, approaches and tools reported in the primary studies, it is expected

that the results in this systematic literature review would help in establishing knowledge on how the companies

should adopt and migrate to the cloud, how the cost-beneﬁt relationship can be evaluated as well as providers

can be selected. These ﬁndings can be a useful reference to develop guidelines for an effective use of cloud

computing.

1 INTRODUCTION

Cloud computing (CC) is a paradigm shift in comput-

ing that has changed the way users deal and perceive

computing (Weiss, 2007). This scenario has created

opportunities for enterprises that have manifested per-

ceived inclination toward cloud computing and the

beneﬁts reaped by them (Buyya et al., 2009). How-

ever, the identiﬁcation of opportunities for migration,

the reasoning of an attractive cost-beneﬁt relationship

and the selection of service providers that best ﬁt their

needs are not trivial tasks (Li et al., 2012a) (Li et al.,

2012b). The selection of commercial cloud providers

is a challenging task and depends on several variables

and indicators. Among other reasons, cloud providers

may continually upgrade their hardware and software

infrastructures, and new commercial Cloud services,

technologies and strategies may gradually enter the

market (Li et al., 2013). Studies have shown that suc-

cessful migration to the cloud are usually driven by

a set of criteria to select providers that best ﬁt their

needs (Li et al., 2012b)(Li et al., 2010)(Garg et al.,

2013).

The motivation for a Systematic Literature Re-

view (SLR) is the need to identify, classify, and com-

pare existing evidence on the strategies used by com-

panies to identify scenarios of migration opportuni-

ties to the cloud computing. To justify the adoption,

a set of factors should be considered for the assess-

ment of the cost-beneﬁt relationship. Moreover, com-

panies should be able to select a provider according to

their needs and proﬁle. The evidences collected and

discussed in this SLR is intended to gain and share

insight from the literature so that companies can de-

cide towards cloud computing. This paper has three

major contributions: i) the identiﬁcation of strategies

and issues that companies have considered to migrate

to the cloud; ii) factors that should be considered in

the cost-beneﬁts relationship while adopting and mi-

grating to the cloud; iii) and ﬁnally aspects related to

the selection of cloud computing service providers.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Sec-

tion 2 provides background related to the research

area and emphasizes the differences between this sys-

tematic review and previous systematic reviews in

the domain. The subsequent sections outlines the

Paula, A. and Carneiro, G.

Cloud Computing Adoption, Cost-beneﬁt Relationship and Strategies for Selecting Providers: A Systematic Review.

In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Software Approaches to Software Engineering (ENASE 2016), pages 27-39

ISBN: 978-989-758-189-2

research methodology (Section 3); presents and dis-

cusses the results of the SLR and its corresponding

analysis (Section 4). The concluding remarks as well

as limitations and scope for future research have been

discussed in Section 5.

2 PROBLEM STATEMENT AND

SCOPE

In this section, we present the concepts related to

cloud computing to justify why we position our con-

tribution of this SLR. Based on a systematic search,

we also link to existing secondary studies that discuss

aspects related to the migration to the cloud and cor-

related factors.

Many enterprises have adopted the paradigm of

cloud computing where producers and consumers (of

information) do not necessarily reside within the same

physical proximity (Gupta et al., 2013) (Li et al.,

2011)(Mahesh et al., 2013). Studies have revealed

that cloud computing adoption by enterprises is pri-

marily based on their perceptions about cost reduc-

tion, ease of use and convenience, reliability, sharing

and collaboration and lastly but not the least, security

and privacy (Gupta et al., 2013).

Cloud computing comprises basically three ser-

vices. Probably the most popular is the Software-

as-a-Service (SaaS). It relies on the principle that in-

stead of installing software on the clients machine and

updating it with regular patches, the applications are

available (hosted) over the web for the consumption

of the end-user. This scenario enables the achieve-

ment of economy of scale (Gupta et al., 2013). The

companies that provide SaaS most of the time hire

the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). The main idea of

PaaS is that instead of buying the software licenses for

platforms like operating systems, databases and mid-

dleware, these platforms along with software devel-

opment kits (SDKs) and the programming languages

(such as Java, .NET) are made available over the web

(Gupta et al., 2013). The last is the Infrastructure-as-

a-Service (IaaS). It refers to the tangible physical de-

vices (raw computing) like virtual computers, servers,

storage devices, network transfer, which are physi-

cally located in one central place (data center) but they

can be accessed remotely and used over the web using

the login authentication systems and respective pass-

words (Gupta et al., 2013).

These three services described above are deployed

following four different models: i) Public cloud is

available from a third party service provider via web

and is a very cost effective option to deploy IT solu-

tions (Mell and Grance, 2011); ii) Private cloud is

managed within an organization and is suitable for

large enterprises (managed within the walls of the

enterprises). Private clouds provide the advantages

of public clouds, but still incur capital expenditures

(Mell and Grance, 2011);iii) Community cloud is used

and controlled by a group of enterprises, which have

shared interests (Mell and Grance, 2011);iv) Hybrid

cloud is a combination of public and private cloud

(Mell and Grance, 2011). This paper focuses on pub-

lic cloud providers and the three types of cloud com-

puting services: SaaS, PaaS and IaaS.

This study has the goal to shed some light on the

practices involved in the adoption of cloud comput-

ing. The results of this study are expected to help

different types of companies to decide for this adop-

tion and how they can plan it. For this end, the study

present different approaches, techniques and tools to

overcome difﬁculties and challenges in the context of

cloud computing. The scope of this review is spe-

ciﬁc to identify strategies that can help organizations

to migrate and adopt cloud computing, their percep-

tion of the cost-beneﬁt relationship of this adoption

and how companies can select service providers that

best ﬁt their needs and proﬁle.

The scope and coverage of this systematic review

differ signiﬁcantly from previous reviews. During the

conduction of this study, we found four systematic

literature reviews (SLRs) focusing on the following

themes: migration to the cloud computing (Jamshidi

et al., 2013), service composition (Jula et al., 2014),

service evaluation (Li et al., 2013) and challenges

and concerns when building cloud-based architec-

tures (Breivold et al., 2014). Despite being rele-

vant source of information for companies that plan to

adopt the cloud computing paradigm, none of these

previous SLRs focused speciﬁcally on the relation-

ship among the issues target in this paper. This re-

lationship is indeed relevant for both the adoption and

migration to the cloud.

3 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

In contrast to a non-structured review process, a Sys-

tematic Literature Review (SLR) (Brereton et al.,

2007) and (Kitchenham and Charters, 2007) reduces

bias and follows a precise and rigorous sequence of

methodological steps to research literature. SLR rely

on well-deﬁned and evaluated review protocols to ex-

tract, analyze, and document results as the stages con-

veyed in Figure 1. This section describes the method-

ology applied for the phases of planning, conducting

and reporting the review.

ENASE 2016 - 11th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Software Approaches to Software Engineering

3.1 Planning the Review

Identify the Needs for a Systematic Review. Search

for evidences in the literature regarding how compa-

nies decide towards cloud computing in terms of (i)

strategies to identify migration opportunities to the

cloud, (ii) relevant factors for the assessment of the

cost-beneﬁt of this adoption of cloud and ﬁnally (iii)

the selection of providers according to their needs and

proﬁle.

Specifying the Research Questions. We aim to

answers the following questions by conducting a

methodological review of existing research:

RQ1. Which strategies are used by companies to

adopt and migrate to the cloud computing? Identify-

ing goals, proposals and motivations for the adoption

of cloud computing, help organizations to better char-

acterize their needs and therefore provide conditions

to a successful migration.

RQ2. Which factors companies consider to assess the

cost-beneﬁt relationship of adoption and migration to

the cloud computing? The knowledge of the costs and

beneﬁts of migration to the cloud computing can be

used as a support for its planning and reference for

other companies.

RQ3. How companies select cloud computing ser-

vice providers according to their needs and proﬁle?

The knowledge of successful strategies and problems

raised by inappropriate selection of cloud computing

providers allow organizations to be more conﬁdent to

identify providers that best ﬁt their needs.

These three research questions are somehow re-

lated to each other. However, studies could have dis-

cussed them separately. Regarding the cost-beneﬁt

relationship addressed by RQ2, it is possible that

this relationship could be analyzed considering a spe-

ciﬁc provider. Moreover, there is the possibility of

studies addressing this scenario comparing various

providers with their respective characteristics analyz-

ing to which extent they ﬁt a company proﬁle. This

fact establish a close relationship between RQ2 and

RQ3.

Publications Time Frame. We conducted a SLR in

journals and conferences papers from January 2005 to

June 2015.

3.2 Conducting the Review

This phase is responsible for executing the review

protocol.

Identiﬁcation of Research. Based on the re-

search questions, keywords were extracted and used

to search the primary study sources. The search string

is presented as follows and used the same strategy

cited in (Chen and Babar, 2011):

((”Cloud Migration” OR ”legacy-to-cloud

migration” OR ”Cloud adoption”) OR

(”Cost” OR ”Return of investments” OR

”ROI” OR ”Cost-beneﬁt”) OR ((”Cloud

Service” OR ”Cloud Provider”) AND

(”Evaluation” OR ”Selection”)) AND

(”Cloud Computing” OR ”Cloud Services”

OR ”Cloud Interoperability”)

Selection of Primary Studies. The following steps

guided the selection of primary studies.

Table 1: Inclusion Criteria.

Criterion Description

IC1 The publications should be journal

or conference and written in En-

glish.

IC2 Works involving an empirical study

or have ”lessons learned” (experi-

ence report).

IC3 If several journal articles reporting

the same study the latest article will

be included.

IC4 The articles that address at least one

of the research questions.

Table 2: Exclusion Criteria.

Criterion Description

EC1 Studies not focused on cloud com-

puting.

EC2 Studies merely based on expert

opinion without locating a speciﬁc

experience, as well as editorials,

prefaces, summaries of articles, in-

terviews, news, analysis/reviews,

readers letters, summaries of tuto-

rials, workshops, panels, and poster

sessions.

EC3 Publications that are earlier ver-

sions of last published work.

EC4 Publications that were published

out of the period January 1st, 2005

to June 2015.

Stage 1 - Search string results automatically ob-

tained from the engines - Submission of the search

string to the following repositories: Digital Library

ACM, IEEE Xplore, Science Direct and Google

Scholar. The justiﬁcation for the selection of these

libraries is their relevance as sources in software en-

gineering (Zhang et al., 2011). The search was per-

formed using the speciﬁc syntax of each database,

Cloud Computing Adoption, Cost-beneﬁt Relationship and Strategies for Selecting Providers: A Systematic Review

considering only the title, keywords, and abstract.

The search was conﬁgured in each repository to select

only papers carried out within the prescribed period.

The automatic search was complemented by a man-

ual search to obtain a list of studies from journals and

conferences. The duplicates were discarded.

Stage 2 - Read titles & abstracts to identify po-

tentially relevant studies - Identiﬁcation of potentially

relevant studies, based on the analysis of title and ab-

stract, discarding studies that are clearly irrelevant to

the search. If there was any doubt about whether a

study should be included or not, it was included for

consideration at a later stage.

Stage 3 - Apply inclusion and exclusion criteria

on reading the introduction, methods and conclusion

- Selected studies in previous stages were reviewed,

by reading the introduction, methodology section and

conclusion. Afterwards, inclusion and exclusion cri-

teria were applied. At this stage, in case of doubt

preventing a conclusion, the study was read in its en-

tirety.

Stage 4 - Obtain primary studies and make a crit-

ical assessment of them - A list of primary studies

was obtained and later subjected to critical examina-

tion using the 11 quality criteria (Dyba and Dingsoyr,

2008) set out in Table 3.

Table 3: Quality Criteria (Dyba and Dingsoyr, 2008).

Criterion Description

QC1 Is the paper based on research (or

is it merely a lessons learned report

based on expert opinion)?

QC2 Is there a clear statement of the aims

of the research?

QC3 Is there an adequate description of

the context in which the research

was carried out?

QC4 Was the research design appropriate

to address the aims of the research?

QC5 Was the recruitment strategy appro-

priate to the aims of the research?

QC6 Was there a control group with

which to compare treatments?

QC7 Was the data collected in a way that

addressed the research issue?

QC8 Was the data analysis sufﬁciently

rigorous?

QC9 Is there a clear statement of ﬁnd-

ings?

Data Extraction. All relevant information on each

study was recorded on a spreadsheet. This informa-

tion was helpful to summarize the data and map them

with its source. The following data were extracted

Figure 1: Stages of the Study Selection Process.

from the studies: (i) name and authors; (ii) type of ar-

ticle (journal, conference, workshop); (iii) aim of the

study; (iv) research question; (v) scenario(s); (vi) re-

sults and conclusions; (vii) beneﬁts; (viii) limitations

and challenges.

Data Synthesis. This synthesis aimed at grouping

ﬁndings from the studies in order to: identify the

main concepts (organized in spreadsheet form), con-

duct a comparative analysis on the characteristics of

the study, type of service adopted, cloud deployment

model, and issues regarding three research questions

(RQ1, RQ2 and RQ3) from each study. Other infor-

mation was synthesized when necessary. We used the

meta-ethnography method (Noblit and Hare, 1988) as

a reference for the process of data synthesis.

Conducting the Review. We started the review with

an automatic search followed by a manual search to

identify potentially relevant studies and afterwards

apply the inclusion/exclusion criteria. The ﬁrst tests

using automatic search began in March 2015. We had

to adapt the the search string in some engines without

losing its primary meaning and scope. The manual

search consisted in studies published in conference

proceedings and journals that were included by the

authors while searching the theme in different reposi-

tories. These studies were equally analyzed regarding

their titles and abstracts. Figure 1 conveys them as

28 studies. We tabulated everything on a spreadsheet

so as to facilitate the subsequent phase of identifying

potentially relevant studies. Figure 1 presents the re-

sults obtained from each electronic database used in

the search, which resulted in 1003 articles consider-

ing all databases.

Potentially Relevant Studies. The results obtained

from both the automatic and manual search were in-

cluded on a single spreadsheet. Papers with identical

title, author(s), year and abstract were discarded as

redundant. At this stage, we registered an overall of

1031 articles, namely 1003 from the automated search

plus 28 from the separate manual search (Stage 1).

We then read titles and abstracts to identify relevant

ENASE 2016 - 11th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Software Approaches to Software Engineering

studies resulting in 106 papers (Stage 2). At (Stage 3)

we applied the quality criteria in each study and then

we read introduction, methodology and conclusion to

decide to consider 70 studies for the next stage. After

applying the quality criteria, remained 66 articles to

answer the three research questions - RQ1, RQ2 and

RQ3 (Stage 4).

4 RESULTS AND ANALYSIS

This section presents the results of this SLR to answer

the research questions RQ1, RQ2 and RQ3. Figure

2 conveys the selected studies and the respective re-

search questions they focus on. As can be seen in

the same Figure, 36 studies addressed issues related

to RQ1, while 25 studies discussed RQ2 issues and,

ﬁnally, ten papers addressed RQ3 issues. All selected

studies are listed in Appendix and referenced as ”S”

followed by the number of the paper.

Figure 2: Selected Studies per Research Question (RQ).

Table 4 presents the top ten papers included in the

review according to Google Scholar citations. These

papers are evidences of the relevance of the issues dis-

cussed in this SLR and the inﬂuence these papers ex-

ert on the literature as can be conﬁrmed by their re-

spective citation numbers. Table 4 shows an overview

of the distribution of the most relevant papers accord-

ing to the addressed research questions. In the fol-

lowing paragraphs we brieﬂy describe these papers.

The paper [S41] that addresses RQ1 has the high-

est number of citations (483)

. It is related to RQ1

and RQ2 and analyzes the use of cloud computing in

manufacturing business companies. It has been exten-

sively used as a successful case of cloud computing

adoption having as a reference parameters of a cost-

beneﬁt relationship to guide such adoption. The paper

[S55] has 477 citations according to Google Scholar

and discusses issues related to RQ3. It describes the

use of a tool called CloudCmp to perform benchmark

suite for cloud platforms. This tool has been recog-

nized as an important reference for benchmarking. To

Data obtained in 11/01/2015

this end, it identiﬁes a common set of services offered

by cloud providers, including elastic computing, per-

sistent storage, and intra-cloud and wide-area net-

working. The authors argue that CloudCmp enables

predicting application performance without having to

ﬁrst port the application onto every cloud provider.

The paper [S3] has 207 citations according to

Google Scholar. The authors discuss how a pro-

posed model can support companies to analyze sev-

eral characteristics of their own business as well as

pre-existing IT resources to identify their favorabil-

ity in the migration to the Cloud Architecture (RQ1).

A general Return on Investment model has also been

developed here taking into consideration various in-

tangible impacts of Cloud Computing, apart from the

cost (RQ2).

The paper [S57] with 201 citations according to

Google Scholar, proposes a framework and a mech-

anism to measure the quality and prioritize Cloud

services providers. According to the authors, given

the diversity of Cloud service offerings, an important

challenge for customers is to ﬁnd out appropriate

Cloud providers that can satisfy their requirements

(RQ3). This makes it difﬁcult to evaluate service

levels of different Cloud providers, justifying the use

of a Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) based

ranking mechanism to provide a quantitative basis for

the ranking of Cloud services where the ﬁnal ranking

is based on the cost (RQ2) and quality (Garg et al.,

2013).

Table 4: Top Ten Cited Papers according to Google Scholar.

Studies Cited by Research Question

S41 483 RQ1

S55 477 RQ3

S3 207 RQ1 and RQ2

S57 201 RQ3

S65 196 RQ1

S4 170 RQ2

S2 153 RQ1 and RQ2

S54 132 RQ3

S59 77 RQ2

S64 74 RQ1

We have identiﬁed that six (S42, S51, S54, S58,

S60, S61, S64) of the 66 selected studies reference the

Technological Organizational Environmental (TOE)

framework (Tornatzky and Fleischer, 1990). It is an

organization-level theory aimed at supporting orga-

nizations in the adoption and implementation of in-

novations. Based on this framework, the innovation

adoption process is inﬂuenced by three aspects of the

enterprise [S64]: i) technological context, which rep-

resents the internal and external technologies related

Cloud Computing Adoption, Cost-beneﬁt Relationship and Strategies for Selecting Providers: A Systematic Review

to the organization; both technologies that are already

in use at the ﬁrm, as well as those that are available

in the marketplace but not currently in use; ii) orga-

nizational context is related to the resources and the

characteristics of the ﬁrm, e.g. size and managerial

structure; iii) environmental context, which refers to

the arena in which a ﬁrm conducts its business; it can

be related to surrounding elements such as industry,

competitors and the presence of technology service

providers. These papers are evidences that this frame-

work is useful to guide organizations toward the adop-

tion of cloud computing.

4.1 Strategies for the Adoption and

Migration to the Cloud (RQ1)

This subsection has the goal to discuss how selected

papers addressed RQ1: Which strategies are used by

companies to identify scenarios of migration oppor-

tunities to the cloud computing?

RQ1 Analysis. As can be seen in Table 5, 25

papers proposed and discussed processes, strategies

and frameworks to help companies in the decision of

adoption and migration to the cloud. In the following

paragraphs we contextualize how each of these papers

contributes to RQ1.

Table 5: Types of support for adoption of cloud computing.

Adoption Support Type Reporting Studies

Experiences and

Case Reports

S11, S18, S24, S25,

S30, S31, S41, S44,

S45, S66

Processes, strategies

and frameworks

S1, S3, S8, S9, S10,

S14, S15, S16, S19,

S20, S21, S23, S27,

S28, S29, S50, S61,

S62, S63, S64, S65

Tools S2, S5, S6, S13

The result of the analysis of the selected papers in-

dicated that four studies proposed the use of tools to

support companies to identify and evaluate scenarios

of migration opportunities to the cloud. The studies

and the respective tools are listed as follows: [S2] de-

scribes a cloud Adoption Toolkit that uses Cost Mod-

eling techniques to examine cost of deploying IT sys-

tem to the cloud. [S5] describes an evaluation of the

tools (CPTS, CSA STAR, C.A.RE and CloudTrust) to

compare them. [S6] discusses the use of CloudMIG

to support Software as a Service (SaaS) providers in

semi-automatically migration of legacy software sys-

tems to the cloud. The desktop-to-cloud-migration

(D2CM) tool that supports transformation and migra-

tion of virtual machine images, deployment descrip-

tion and life-cycle management for applications was

designed to help researchers to migrate their applica-

tions to the cloud [S13].

On the other hand, 21 of the selected studies pro-

posed approaches to guide the migration to the cloud:

The authors of [S1] performed an analysis of ex-

isting migration methods, classifying them in ﬁve mi-

gration strategies as presented as follows: (i) migrate

to IaaS, (ii) migrate to PaaS, (iii) replace by SaaS,

(iv) revise based on SaaS, and (v) re-engineering to

SaaS. The similarities and differences between the

migration strategies are discussed, and the challenges

and future work about legacy system migration to the

cloud are proposed. According to [S3], Cloud Com-

puting adoption is inﬂuenced by characteristics such

as size of IT resources, utilization pattern of the re-

sources, sensitivity of the data they are handling, and

criticality of the work performed by the company.

[S8] identiﬁes resources rationalization by type of or-

ganization. A decision process aimed at supporting

Information system migration to the Cloud, and pro-

pose a synthesis for the choice of Cloud structures ac-

cording to type of organization. [S9] describes a strat-

egy to help software companies to decide of what is

more convenient: to migrate or to start from scratch

based on evaluation of costs, ROI, efforts and migra-

tion tasks.

Cloud Services Brokerages (CSBs) act as interme-

diaries between the consumer and providers. They

are considered as a viable solution to address migra-

tion issues [S10]. [S14] shows that even small and

medium-sized companies may have competitive ad-

vantages to migrate their applications to the cloud,

presents a step-by-step process to support cloud adop-

tion and migration decisions in the enterprise using

for this the Decision Process called Cloudstep to sup-

port the migration decision. The author of [S15]

uses InCLOUDer to assists organizations in adapting

their applications to cloud environments according to

their many interdependent criteria for cloud migra-

tion. [S16] analyzes features of cloud computing ser-

vices to determine the practicability and methodology

to migrate legacy applications to the cloud and a com-

patibility checklist was used to estimate the cost of

the migration. [S19] proposes an approach based on

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) techniques to mi-

grate legacy systems to the cloud. In fact, it used busi-

ness and technical factors to reverse engineer legacy

software into models from which cloud-based soft-

ware can be generated. [S20] proposed a migration

process framework outlining major steps and their

concerns. This has served as a basis to extract crit-

ical problems in business and technical terms.

The Study [S21] presents Cloud-Assisted Live

ENASE 2016 - 11th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Software Approaches to Software Engineering

Media Streaming (CALMS), a generic framework

that facilitates a migration to the cloud. [S23] dis-

cusses the methodology of migrations along with the

challenges and issues that usually acts as a barrier

for organizations trying to pursue this goal. A set

of migration patterns which span the continuum from

legacy IT environment to the cloud is included as a

common framework for aligning the various migra-

tion approaches developed. [S27] combined the con-

cept of BPR and GBPR to propose a framework based

on paradigms to support migration to cloud. Three

paradigms are proposed. The process paradigm refers

to the jobs to be accomplished during cloud migra-

tion in terms of the examination of current processes,

the development of new processes under cloud con-

text, and the determination of the key performance

indicators and key ecological indicators for new pro-

cesses. [S28] proposed a framework, namely Plan-

Negotiate-Implement-Check (PNIC), to analyze the

customer concerns, categorize them from the perspec-

tive of trust and security, and develop a plan for build-

ing and sustaining trust. [S29] discussed a cloud mi-

gration framework along with a successful migration

case study of existing on-premise applications onto

cloud using this factory based approach and migra-

tion framework. [S50] proposed a ﬂexible deploy-

ment environment to migrate existing application us-

ing Hadoop. The authors illustrated the migration of

a text-mining application by a number of stages to-

wards deployment in a cloud environment.

In [S61] a research model was developed based

on the innovation characteristics from the diffu-

sion of innovation (DOI) theory and the technology-

organization-environment (TOE) framework. The

[S62] study presented an extensible architecture for

detecting software systems violations against limited

access to the underlying ﬁle system or enforced re-

strictions regarding provided standard APIs. The vi-

olation detection process and the highlighting of cru-

cial system parts are essential early-phase activities

of the CloudMIG approach to support the migration

of legacy systems to the cloud. Based on theoretical

models and qualitative interviews, a model of rele-

vant factors was developed. This model provides in-

dividual, organizational, technical, and environmen-

tal factors inﬂuencing the diffusion and acceptance of

Cloud Computing among Small and Medium Enter-

prises (SMEs) [S63]. [S64] discussed the main fac-

tors that were identiﬁed as playing a signiﬁcant role

in SME adoption of cloud services: relative advan-

tage, uncertainty, geo-restriction, compatibility, size,

top management support, prior experience, innova-

tiveness, industry, market scope, supplier efforts and

external computing support. [S65] proposes a re-

search model to assess SaaS-adoption at the applica-

tion level, based on the transaction cost theory, the

resource-based view, and the theory of planned be-

havior.

Finally, ten studies discussed case studies to il-

lustrate the migration process. The [S11] presented

a case study moving a traditional FTP server to the

cloud implemented on Windows Azure. [S18] dis-

cussed the motivation, requirements and feasibility

of migrating CiteSeerX digital library to provide an

IaaS model in a private cloud are discussed in [S18],

the challenges encountered prior to and during the

migration and the post-migration issues and possi-

ble solutions are reported. In [S24] legacy systems

are expanded and updated effectively with the use of

open source virtualization server management soft-

ware cloudstack. The security risk and solution rele-

vant to an EHR (electronic health records) system de-

ployment in a IaaS cloud is presented in [S25] cover

only a fraction of the challenges facing a large-scale

migration of public e-health systems to IaaS clouds.

[S30] discusses when to migrate software testing to

the cloud from two perspectives: the characteristics of

an application under test, and the types of testing per-

formed on the application. [S31] provides researchers

and practitioners with empirical insights into the mo-

tivations for and experiences of implementing cloud

enterprise systems based on two case studies.

The paper [S41] describes the possibilities of

adoption cloud computing in the manufacturing sec-

tor and suggests two types of cloud computing adop-

tions, manufacturing with direct adoption of cloud

computing technologies and cloud manufacturing.

The migration of an on-premises web application,

used on a secondary vocational school, to the cloud

was analyzed in [S44]. It then compares the appli-

cations performance when deployed to a traditional

Windows server versus its deployment to Windows

Azure. [S45] abstracts from current market prices

and investigates the interaction of cloud provider

and clients from an analytical perspective. A gen-

eral understanding of how providers and clients po-

tentially beneﬁt ﬁnancially from Infrastructure-as-a-

Service (IaaS) can help clients to appraise price uncer-

tainty in strategic resource planning decisions. [S66]

report an empirical study aimed at examining cloud

computing adoption challenges and difﬁculties in the

context of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in

Ireland.

4.2 The Cost-beneﬁts Relationship in

the Adoption and Migration (RQ2)

This subsection discusses how selected papers ad-

Cloud Computing Adoption, Cost-beneﬁt Relationship and Strategies for Selecting Providers: A Systematic Review

dressed RQ2: Which factors are considered by com-

panies to assess the cost-beneﬁt relationship of adop-

tion and migration to the cloud computing?

During the analysis of RQ2, we identiﬁed that

there is a myriad of factors proposed and used to an-

alyze the cost-beneﬁt relationship of cloud comput-

ing adoption. There is no consensus of which factors

should be used for this end.

In [S3] a formula is deﬁned to calculate the Re-

turn of Investments (ROI) of adopting Cloud Com-

puting. An approach to detect performance antipat-

terns before migrating to CC based on static analysis

was presented in [S12]. In [S4] the architectural fea-

tures of CC are explored and classiﬁed according to

the requirements of end-users, enterprises, and cloud

providers themselves to support the cloud adoption.

The [S2] study describes the Cloud Adoption Toolkit

that provides a framework and a cost modelling tool

to support decision makers. In [S16] the authors pre-

sented a compatibility checklist that is used to esti-

mate the cost of application migration to PaaS. The

migration of legacy applications to cloud comput-

ing was discussed in [S17], focusing on application

performance analysis and providers characteristics.

[S22] discussed migration of agile based project to

cloud in terms of cost, time and quality. [S23] Dis-

cusses some of the potential issues and challenges that

organizations may face while considering to migrate

workloads to cloud: Efﬁciency, agility, quality, secu-

rity, governance and standardization in the delivery,

consumption and operation of IT services, all at re-

duced capital and operational expense. In [S32] an

analysis of the difﬁculties of companys traditional ac-

counting system have been investigated. The factors

affecting migration and adoption were studied and the

best cloud deployment and service models complying

with company requirements suggested.

The paper [S33] attempts to reﬂect on the issues

associated with interoperability and portability, but

with a focus on vendor lock-in. Moreover, the pa-

per demonstrates the importance of interoperability,

portability and standards applicable to cloud comput-

ing environments, provides a foundation for future

analysis and review regarding the impact of vendor

neutrality for corporate cloud computing application

and services. In [S34] a critical review of pertinent

business, technical and legal issues associated with

vendor lock-in, and how it impacts on the widespread

adoption of cloud computing was presented. A prob-

abilistic model was adopted to evaluate the decision

to migrate to cloud storage against the alternative to

buy the storage devices and facilities under a proba-

bilistic model for the evolution of storage character-

istics, disk failures, and prices based on the Value-at-

Risk as a risk metric [S35]. Within the [S36] study

proposes the use of a real option model to help think

about when to switch to cloud based on the expected

beneﬁts, uncertainties and the value a company puts

on money.

The [S37] study how mechanisms, namely, check

pointing and migration, can be used to minimize the

cost and volatility of resource provisioning. Based

on the real price history of Amazon EC2 spot in-

stances, several adaptive check pointing schemes in

terms of monetary costs and improvement of job com-

pletion times are compared, schemes that apply pre-

dictive methods for spot prices and a study how work

migration can improve task completion in the midst

of failures while maintaining low monetary costs are

evaluated. Other study focuses on factors as namely

availability, portability, integration, migration com-

plexity, data privacy and security [S38]. Study [S39]

identiﬁes and investigates a number of cognitive fac-

tors that contribute to shaping user perceptions of and

attitude toward mobile cloud computing services by

integrating these factors with the technology accep-

tance model. A structural equation modeling analysis

is employed and results reveal that user acceptance of

mobile cloud services is largely affected by perceived

mobility, connectedness, security, quality of service

and system, and satisfaction. A literature review on

technological innovation characteristics in this con-

text is conducted to identify potential gaps in ongo-

ing research. The review also provides an overview

of relevant empirical studies on cloud computing that

are based on the Diffusion of Innovation (DoI) the-

ory (Rogers, 2003) and the Technology Acceptance

Model (TAM) (Davis, 1987). Consequently, the focus

is set on the examination of the factors compatibility,

relative advantage, complexity, image and security &

trust [S42].

The [S43] study presents an analysis of how mo-

bile device resources such as energy and bandwidth,

along with cloud infrastructure resources, can be

managed effectively in the mobile cloud domain. The

best practice approaches for implementations is ap-

plied to existing works in the area, along with our

Context Aware Mobile Cloud Services (CAMCS)

cloud middleware and the Cloud Personal Assistant

(CPA), the representative of the user within the mid-

dleware. In [S44] the cloud model discussed is

composed of ﬁve essential factors: On-demand self-

service, Broad network access, Resource pooling,

Rapid elasticity, Measured service. [S51] proposes a

tripod model of SaaS readiness that suggests that or-

ganizational users need to get prepared from techno-

logical, organizational and environmental aspects for

the adoption of SaaS. A taxonomy to help proﬁle and

ENASE 2016 - 11th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Software Approaches to Software Engineering

standardize the details of performance evaluation of

commercial Cloud services [S52].

In [S53] the de facto metrics adopted in the

existing Cloud services evaluation work were col-

lected and arranged following different Cloud ser-

vice features to be evaluated, which essentially con-

structed an evaluation metrics catalogue. This met-

rics catalogue can be used to facilitate the future

practice and research in the area of Cloud ser-

vices evaluation. In [S58] the TOE (Technology-

Organization-Environment) framework and HOT-ﬁt

(Human-Organization-Technology ﬁt) model were

used to investigate the critical factors affecting hos-

pitals decisions regarding the adoption of cloud com-

puting technology. Another study presents ﬁve fac-

tors inﬂuencing the cloud usage: ease of use and con-

venience, security and privacy, cost reduction, reli-

ability, sharing and collaborating [S59]. The study

[S60] discussed how cloud adoption intention, pric-

ing and deployment options were derived from the

TOE framework. The authors argued that the pre-

ferred pricing strategy results in part from a costbene-

ﬁt analysis, and the deployment strategy results in part

from risk analysis, were important issues that previ-

ous cloud studies have seldom investigated.

Table 6: Types of support for the cost-beneﬁt relationship

in cloud computing adoption.

Adoption Support Type Reporting Studies

Experiences and

Case Reports

S44

Processes, strategies

and frameworks

S2, S3, S12, S14,

S16, S17, S23, S32,

S33, S34, S35, S36,

S37, S38, S43

Tools S2

4.3 Selecting Cloud Computing Service

Providers (RQ3)

This subsection discusses how selected papers ad-

dressed RQ3: How companies select cloud computing

service providers according to their needs and pro-

ﬁle?

According to Table 7, eight papers proposed and

discussed processes, strategies and frameworks to

help companies to select Cloud Service Providers

(CSP). Two papers propose tools to support this sce-

nario and one paper focused on case studies to illus-

trate this situation. In the following paragraphs we

contextualize how each of these papers contributes to

RQ3.

According to (Garrison et al., 2012), IT-related

success is described through three categories of de-

Table 7: Types of support for the selection of CSPs.

Selection Support Type Reporting Studies

Experiences and

Case Reports

S56

Process, strategies

and frameworks

S26, S40, S46, S47,

S48, S49, S54, S57

Tools S7, S55

rived beneﬁt: strategic, economic and technological.

Strategic refers to an organizations renewed focus on

its core business activities that can accompany a move

to cloud computing when its IT functions, whole or

in part, are hosted and/or managed by a cloud ven-

dor. Economic refers to an organizations ability to

tap the cloud vendors expertise and technological re-

sources to reduce in-house IT expenses. Techno-

logical refers to an organizations access to state-of-

the-art technology and skilled personnel, eliminat-

ing the risk and cost of in-house technological ob-

solescence. Deployment is deﬁned in terms of the

strategic, economic,and technological beneﬁts real-

ized through cloud computing, setting the organiza-

tion apart from its competitors.

According to Figure 2, eleven papers discuss is-

sues related to RQ3. [S56] evaluates Google Com-

pute Engine (GCE) and compare it with Amazon

EC2 services to support the deployment of scientiﬁc

applications. [S26] uses a migration decision sup-

port system (MDSS) to select providers. The pa-

per also evaluate the decision support system in a

real scenario with two providers (Microsoft Azure

e Google). [S40] proposes an approach to support

migration of computing infrastructure to the cloud

by selecting the most suitable cloud conﬁguration in

terms of infrastructural requirements and cost. [S46]

proposes a framework to support requirements elic-

itation to select providers focused on security and

privacy issues. The paper [S47] describes in de-

tail an approach to select providers based on multi-

criteria decision-making (MCDM) and optimization

based approaches. [S48] proposes an approach called

Complete-Auditable-Reportable (C.A.RE) to select

CSPs The C.A.RE approach helps to determine the

adequacy of a CSP sponsored security by assess-

ing its completeness in addressing the possible risks

that a service may be exposed to. Paper [S49] pro-

poses an approach that considers Function, Auditabil-

ity, Governability and Interoperability(FAGI) to help

cloud service consumers in selecting a trusted CSP.

The [S54] study proposes a taxonomy of eight im-

portant Cloud computing elements covering service

type, resource deployment, hardware, runtime tuning,

business model, middleware, and performance. An-

other study [S57] proposes a framework SMICloud

Cloud Computing Adoption, Cost-beneﬁt Relationship and Strategies for Selecting Providers: A Systematic Review

that compares differents CSPs and measure QoS at-

tributes deﬁned by Cloud Service Measurement In-

dex Consortium (CSMIC). At last 2 articles presented

tools: [S7] that proposed a simulation tool CDOSIM

that can simulate cost and performance. It extends

the cloud simulator CloudSim and integrates into our

cloud migration framework CloudMIG e [S55] that

presents a tool called CloudCmp to compare perfor-

mance and costs of cloud providers by measuring the

elastic computing, persistent storage, and networking

services. Papers [S46], [S48] and [S49] focus on se-

curity and privacy issues to select providers.

This systematic review provides evidence of

strategies used by companies to identify opportunities

to migrate and adopt cloud computing, how they as-

sess the cost-beneﬁt relationship and strategies behind

the rationale to select providers. A spectrum of tech-

niques and approaches has been identiﬁed that cope

with various concerns, i.e., security and trustworthi-

ness, elasticity, portability and interoperability, and

cloud resilience. In addition, many studies look into

reference architectures and cloud-based architecture

design methods as well.

4.4 Implications for Research and

Practice

The following types of validity issues were consid-

ered when interpreting the results from this review.

Conclusion validity. There may be bias in data ex-

traction. However, this was addressed through deﬁn-

ing a data extraction form to ensure consistent extrac-

tion of relevant data to answering the research ques-

tions. The ﬁndings and implications are based on the

extracted data. Internal validity. One possible threat

is the selection bias. We addressed this threat dur-

ing the selection step of the review, i.e. the studies

included in this review were identiﬁed through a thor-

ough selection process which comprises of multiple

stages. Construct validity. The studies identiﬁed from

the systematic review were accumulated from multi-

ple literature databases covering relevant journals and

proceedings. One possible threat is bias in the selec-

tion of publications. This is addressed through spec-

ifying a research protocol that deﬁnes the research

questions and objectives of the study, inclusion and

exclusion criteria, search strings that we intend to use,

the search strategy and strategy for data extraction.

5 CONCLUSIONS

This paper presented a Systematic Literature Review

(SLR) to identify, classify, and compare existing evi-

dence on the strategies used by companies to identify

scenarios of migration opportunities to the cloud, as

well as the cost-beneﬁt relationship of this migration

and selection of CSP. Far from being anecdotal, the

evidences collected and discussed in this SLR have

the goal to gain and share insight from the literature so

that companies can have more conﬁdence and hence

decide towards cloud computing. The major contribu-

tion of this paper is to identify new factors as well as

to develop a sense of the relative weight of the cost-

beneﬁt relationship and the selection of providers and

their respective services. As future work, we plan to

characterize how providers perceive the clients adop-

tion and migration to the cloud computing paradigm

and how they may adjust their strategies to better meet

the needs of customers. We also plan to perform the

snowballing technique by checking references of the

selected studies in order to extend the number of rel-

evant studies related to the research questions.

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APPENDIX

Table 8: Studies included in the review.

ID Author, Title Venue Year

S1 J.-F. Zhao and J.-T. Zhou, Strategies and

Methods for Cloud Migration.

IJAC 2014

S2 A. Khajeh-Hosseini, D. Greenwood, J. W.

Smith and I. Sommerville, The Cloud Adop-

tion Toolkit: Supporting Cloud Adoption

Decisions in the Enterprise. Top Ten Cited

Paper According to Google Scholar

SPE 2012

S3 S. C. Misra and A. Mondal, Identiﬁcation of

a Companys Suitability for the Adoption of

Cloud Computing and Modelling Its Cor-

responding Return on Investment. Top Ten

Cited Paper According to Google Scholar

MCM 2011

S4 B. Rimal, A. Jukan, D. Katsaros and Y.

Goeleven. Architectural requirements for

cloud computing systems: an enterprise

cloud approach. Top Ten Cited Paper Ac-

cording to Google Scholar

JGC 2011

S5 M. I. M. Almanea A Survey and Evalu-

ation of the Existing Tools that Support

Adoption of Cloud Computing and Se-

lection of Trustworthy and Transparent

Cloud Providers.

INCoS 2014

S6 S. Frey and W. Hasselbring An Extensible

Architecture for Detecting Violations of a

Cloud Environments Constraints during

Legacy Software System Migration.

CSMR 2011

S7 F. Fittkau, S. Frey and W. Hasselbring,

CDOSim: Simulating cloud deployment

options for software migration support.

MESOCA 2012

S8 O. Sefraoui, M. Aissaoui and M. Eleuldj,

Cloud computing migration and IT re-

sources rationalization.

ICMCS 2014

S9 J. Alonso, L. Orue-Echevarria, M. Es-

calante, J. Gorronogoitia and D. Presenza,

Cloud modernization assessment frame-

work: Analyzing the impact of a potential

migration to Cloud.

MESOCA 2013

S10 B. Wadhwa, A. Jaitly, and B. Suri, Cloud Ser-

vice Brokers: An Emerging Trend in Cloud

Adoption and Migration.

APSEC 2013

S11 L. Zhou, CloudFTP: A Case Study of

Migrating Traditional Applications to the

Cloud.

ISDEA 2013

S12 V. S. Sharma and S. Anwer, Detecting Per-

formance Antipatterns before Migrating to

the Cloud.

CloudCom 2013

S13 S. N. Srirama, V. Ivanistsev, P. Jakovits, and

C. Willmore, Direct migration of scientiﬁc

computing experiments to the cloud.

HPCSim 2013

S14 P. R. M. Andrade, R. G. Araujo, J. C. Filho,

T. R. Pereira, A. B. Albuquerque, and N. C.

Mendonca, Improving Business by Migrat-

ing Applications to the Cloud Using Cloud-

step.

WAINA 2015

S15 A. Juan-Verdejo, S. Zschaler, B. Sura-

jbali, H. Baars, and H.-G. Kemper, In-

CLOUDer: A Formalised Decision Sup-

port Modelling Approach to Migrate Ap-

plications to Cloud Environments.

SEAA 2014

S16 Q. H. Vu and R. Asal, Legacy Application

Migration to the Cloud: Practicability and

Methodology.

SERVICES 2012

S17 G. Kousiouris and D. Kyriazis, Legacy ap-

plications on the cloud: Challenges and

enablers focusing on application perfor-

mance analysis and providers characteris-

tics.

SERVICES 2012

Cloud Computing Adoption, Cost-beneﬁt Relationship and Strategies for Selecting Providers: A Systematic Review

Table 8: Studies included in the review (cont.).

S18 J. Wu, P. Teregowda, K. Williams, M.

Khabsa, D. Jordan, E. Treece, C. L. Giles,

Migrating a Digital Library to a Private

Cloud.

IC2E 2014

S19 A. Bergmayr, H. Brunelire, J. L. C. Izquierdo,

J. Gorroogoitia, G. Kousiouris, D. Kyriazis,

M. Wimmer, Migrating legacy software to

the cloud with ARTIST.

CSMR 2013

S20 C. Pahl, and H. Xiong, Migration to PaaS

clouds - Migration process and architec-

tural concerns.

MESOCA 2013

S21 F. Wang, J. Liu, M. Chen and H. Wang, Mi-

gration Towards Cloud-Assisted Live Me-

dia Streaming.

TNET 2014

S22 M. Manuja, Moving agile based projects on

Cloud.

IAdCC 2014

S23 J. Banerjee, Moving to the cloud: Workload

migration techniques and approaches.

HiPC 2012

S24 B. Cai, F. Xu, F. Ye and W. Zhou, Research

and application of migrating legacy sys-

tems to the private cloud platform with

cloudstack.

ICAL 2012

S25 A. Michalas, N. Paladi and C. Gehrmann, Se-

curity aspects of e-Health systems migra-

tion to the cloud.

HealthCom 2014

S26 V. Andrikopoulos, Z. Song and F. Leymann,

Supporting the migration of applications

to the cloud through a decision support sys-

tem.

CLOUD 2013

S27 H.-I. Wang, and C. Hsu, The paradigm

framework of cloud migration based on

BPR and gBPR.

ICAwST 2013

S28 S. Saadat and H. R. Shahriari, Towards a

process-oriented framework for improving

trust and security in migration to cloud.

ISCISC 2014

S29 B. P. Peddigari, Uniﬁed Cloud Migra-

tion Framework Using factory based ap-

proach.

INDCON 2014

S30 T. Parveen and S. Tilley, When to Migrate

Software Testing to the Cloud?

ICSTW 2010

S31 T. Boillat and C. Legner, Why Do Com-

panies Migrate Towards Cloud Enterprise

Systems? A Post-Implementation Perspec-

tive.

CBI 2014

S32 M. Sadighi, Accounting System on Cloud:

A Case Study.

ITNG 2014

S33 B. C. Tak, B. Urgaonkar and A. Sivasubrama-

niam, Cloudy with a Chance of Cost Sav-

ings.

TPDS 2012

S34 J. Opara-Martins, R. Sahandi and F. Tian,

Critical review of vendor lock-in and its

impact on adoption of cloud computing.

i-Society 2014

S35 L. Mastroeni and M. Naldi, Long-range

Evaluation of Risk in the Migration to

Cloud Storage.

CEC 2011

S36 C. -Y. Yam, A. Baldwin, S. Shiu and C. Ioan-

nidisMigration to Cloud as Real Option:

Investment Decision under Uncertainty.

TrustCom 2011

S37 S. Yi, A. Andrzejak and D. Kondo Monetary

Cost-Aware Checkpointing and Migration

on Amazon Cloud Spot Instances.

TSC 2011

S38 N. Phaphoom, X. Wang, S. Samuel, S.

Helmer and P. AbrahamssonA survey study

on major technical barriers affecting the

decision to adopt cloud services.

JSS 2015

S39 E. Park and K. J. KimAn Integrated Adop-

tion Model of Mobile Cloud Services: Ex-

ploration of Key Determinants and Exten-

sion of Technology Acceptance Model.

TELE 2014

Table 8: Studies included in the review (cont.).

S40 J. Garca-Galn, P. Trinidad, O. F. Rana

and A. Ruiz-CortsAutomated conﬁguration

support for infrastructure migration to the

cloud.

FGCS 2015

S41 X. Xu From cloud computing to cloud

manufacturing. Top Ten Cited Paper Ac-

cording to Google Scholar

RCIM 2012

S42 M. Stieninger, D. Nedbal, W. Wetzlinger, G.

Wagner and M. A. Erskine Impacts on the

Organizational Adoption of Cloud Com-

puting: A Reconceptualization of Inﬂuenc-

ing Factors.

PROTCY 2014

S43 M. J. OSullivan and D. Grigoras Integrating

mobile and cloud resources management

using the cloud personal assistant.

SIMPAT 2014

S44 P. J. P. da Costa and A. M. R. da Cruz. Migra-

tion to Windows Azure Analysis and Com-

parison.

PROTCY 2012

S45 J. Knsemller and H. Karl A game-theoretic

approach to the ﬁnancial beneﬁts of

infrastructure-as-a-service.

FGCS 2014

S46 H. Mouratidis, S. Islam, C. Kalloniatis and S.

Gritzalis. A framework to support selection

of cloud providers based on security and

privacy requirements.

JSS 2013

S47 S. Le, H. Dong, F. K. Hussain, O. K. Hus-

sain, E. Chang, L. Sun, E. Chang.Cloud ser-

vice selection: State-of-the-art and future

research directions.

JNCA 2014

S48 M. Ouedraogo and H. Mouratidis Selecting a

Cloud Service Provider in the age of cyber-

crime.

COSE 2013

S49 C. Tang and J. Liu.Selecting a trusted cloud

service provider for your SaaS program.

COSE 2015

S50 F. CRowe, J. Brinkley and N.

Tabrizi.Migrating Legacy Applica-

tions to the Cloud.

CLOUDCOM 2013

S51 Z. Yang, J. Sun, Y. Zhang and Y.

Wang.Understanding SaaS adoption from

the perspective of organizational users: A

tripod readiness model.

CHB 2014

S52 Z. Li, L. OBrien, R. Cai and H. Zhang. To-

wards a Taxonomy of Performance Evalu-

ation of Commercial Cloud Services.

CLOUD 2012

S53 Z. Li, L. OBrien, H. Zhang and R. Cai. On a

Catalogue of Metrics for Evaluating Com-

mercial Cloud Services.

IWGC 2012

S54 R. Prodan and S. Ostermann. A Survey and

Taxonomy of Infrastructure as a Service

and Web Hosting Cloud Providers. Top Ten

Cited Paper According to Google Scholar

IWGC 2009

S55 A. Li, X. Yang, S. Kandula and M. Zhang.

CloudCmp: Comparing Public Cloud

Providers. Top Ten Cited Paper According

to Google Scholar

IMC 2010

S56 Z. Li, L. OBrien, R. Ranjan and M. Zhang.

Early Observations on Performance of

Google Compute Engine for Scientiﬁc

Computing.

CLOUDCOM 2013

S57 S. K. Garg, S. Versteeg and R. Buyya. A

framework for ranking of cloud computing

services. Top Ten Cited Paper According to

Google Scholar

FGCS 2013

S58 J. W. Lian, D. C. Yen, Y. T. WangAn ex-

ploratory study to understand the criti-

cal factors affecting the decision to adopt

cloud computing in Taiwan hospital.

IJIM 2014

ENASE 2016 - 11th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Software Approaches to Software Engineering

Table 8: Studies included in the review (cont.).

S59 P. Gupta, A. Seetharaman, and J. R. Raj. The

usage and adoption of cloud computing by

small and medium businesses. Top Ten

Cited Paper According to Google Scholar

IJIM 2013

S60 P. F. Hsu, S. Ray and Y. Y. Li-Hsieh. Ex-

amining cloud computing adoption inten-

tion, pricing mechanism, and deployment

model.

IJIM 2014

S61 T. Oliveira, M. Thomas and M. Espadanal.

Assessing the determinants of cloud com-

puting adoption: An analysis of the manu-

facturing and services sectors.

IM 2014

S62 S. Frey, W. Hasselbring and B. Schnoor. Au-

tomatic conformance checking for migrat-

ing software systems to cloud infrastruc-

tures and platforms.

JSEP 2013

S63 M. Stieninger and D. Nedbal. Diffusion and

Acceptance of Cloud Computing in SMEs

Towards a Valence Model of Relevant Fac-

tors.

HICSS 2014

S64 Y. Alshamaila, S. Papagiannidis and F. Li.

Cloud computing adoption by SMEs in the

north east of England. Top Ten Cited Paper

According to Google Scholar

JEIM 2013

S65 A. Benlian, T. Hess and P. Buxmann. Drivers

of SaaS-Adoption An Empirical Study of

Different Application Types. Top Ten Cited

Paper According to Google Scholar

BISE 2009

S66 M. Carcary, E. Doherty and G. Conway. The

Adoption of Cloud Computing by Irish

SMEs an Exploratory Study.

EJISE 2014

Cloud Computing Adoption, Cost-beneﬁt Relationship and Strategies for Selecting Providers: A Systematic Review