Refinement and extension of the cloud decision support framework for application migration to the cloud

Abstract

The maturity and dissemination of Cloud Computing across diverse business domains is leading to an increasing amount of migration projects with the goal to leverage the associated benefits for important legacy applications. However, the migration of applications to the cloud is a complex problem that entails various technical and organizational aspects. The existing Cloud Decision Support Framework has been a first step to provide decision makers with the means to find a suitable migration strategy. This master's thesis has refined the framework's underlying knowledge base by reviewing its decision points, decisions and their relations as well as outcomes. Based on this refinement, the framework has been extended by elaborating the relations between outcomes resulting in greater potential for decision support. In order to allow decision makers to derive migration strategies based on the framework in an interactive manner, a web application has been implemented. In a final step, an evaluation has been carried out comprising a validation of the knowledge base and, by means of a use case, a demonstration of the efficacy of the extended decision support framework.