Flexible Pricing Models for Cloud Computing Based on Group Decision Making Under Consensus

Today, cloud computing is transforming the consumption of IT/ITeS. Numerous vendors are offering services where computing, storage and application resources, can be dynamically provisioned on a pay per use basis, purely based on the user’s need. However, the demands and requirements of different users vary significantly. In order to maximize the revenue, a flexible pricing approach is required, which can address these diverse requirements systematically. These systemic approaches need to estimate the potential value of such services to specific users for a specific context. The tradeoffs from potential value drivers also need to be accounted for while prioritizing the value drivers. In these lines, the current study proposes a flexible pricing approach for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), one of the important delivery models, based on its perceived value to multiple key stake-holders. The proposed approach prioritizes and aggregates the key features of IaaS for the migration to cloud, from multiple key users’ perspective by integrating fuzzy set theory and analytic hierarchy process for group decision making under consensus. Subsequently, the prioritization is mapped with a utility function to estimate the trade-offs from each value driver. The performance of the proposed approach has also been compared with that of another flexible pricing model through a case study.