Cloud migration process - A survey, evaluation framework and open challenges

摘要

Cloud computing in recent years have offered services for SaaS (software as a service), PaaS (platform as a service), and laaS (infrastructure as a service). This has led to more IT-based organizations moving their legacy assets to cloud environments. However, this raises concerns such as security, interoperability, and vendor lock-in. This article reviews existing cloud migration approaches, to examine 1. The existing approaches proposing a migration model for moving legacy applications to cloud environments in the literature, 2. Current state of these approaches with reference to the proposed evaluation framework introduced, 3. Generic criteria, as typically expected for a software development methodology, are supported by these approaches, and 4. What cloud-specific criteria are supported by these approaches. The proposed framework is a two-dimensional set of criteria was developed for generic and cloud-specific ones. While the generic criteria have eleven dimensions, the cloud criteria have seventeen dimensions. The paper has adopted the systematic review procedure proposed by Kitchenham et al. (Ref. 1) as a survey approach. The results are discussed in terms of overall demographic information about the studies including the year of publication, publication channels, authors' nationality, and the quality assessment of the papers and the analysis of the studies against each dimension of the proposed framework. Some of the challenges and future research directions are discussed. (73 refs.)