A Methodological approach to support cloud computing migration

Context. The growing prevalence and potential impact of cloud computing technology have sparked significant attention amongst IT industry and academia. It offers potential clients a wide range of services which are universally accessible, acquirable, releasable, and payable on the fly based on the amount of usage. Many IT-based organisations are moving their legacy software applications to cloud environments. An effective method for conducting such transition is crucial to a successful migration. The literature review reveals that the methodological aspect of the cloud migration has not been well addressed, despite calls expressed by several researchers to resolve this issue. The existing knowledge about cloud migration process is fragmented over the literature, narrow in tactical focus with heterogeneous viewpoints, and lacking support for creating customised methods, that fit given cloud migration scenarios.Objective. By adopting the design science paradigm, this research proposes a framework, which provides a generic process model of cloud migration with associated guidelines. The model can be reused and tailored for creating, configuring, and maintaining situational methods for various cloud migration scenarios.Method. The proposed framework is based a model-driven software development approach and offers two functionalities: (i) an overarching and platform-independent process model which captures domain constructs relevant to the cloud migration which a typical cloud migration may entail; and (ii) a tailoring procedure which aids creating, fine-tuning, standardising, and sharing situational methods for given cloud migration scenarios through reusing the process model. The framework is iteratively evaluated and refined by feedback received from domain experts and case studies.Contributions. The framework facilitates consistent communication and efficient knowledge sharing and exchange in the cloud migration domain. It also underpins a substrate for creating, standardising, maintaining, and publishing situational methods for various cloud migration scenarios