A Decision Framework Model for Migration into Cloud: Business, Application, Security and Privacy Perspectives

Cloud computing offers a different, affordable approach for supporting the IT needs of organisations. However, despite the unprecedented benefits cloud migration may bring, there are numerous difficulties involved in moving business critical applications, legacy systems or corporate data into the cloud. It is necessary to consider a broad view over all business areas, and taking into account the technical and business minutiae of a full scale cloud migration, as well as the wider concerns of security, privacy and other business and technical risks. A detailed understanding of all these areas is required in order to make the correct decisions concerning cloud migration. This paper aims to take a broad view of the issues relating to migration. We propose a process model to identify risks and requirements, as well as to provide control assurance during the migration decision. We also define an outline migration strategy by focusing on the context of the organisation.