Facilitating business-oriented cloud transformation decision with cloud transformation advisor

To move applications to the cloud is not only a technical decision but also a business-oriented decision, in which both business and technical factors (e.g. transformation effort, multi-tenancy and auto-scaling enablement, scalability and extensibility) should be considered. However, existing approaches and tools do not support a consumable business oriented cloud transformation decision to select more suitable transformation solution with the right cloud delivery model, services type, affordable transformation effort and etc. In this paper, we introduce a practical three-step approach and a tool, CTA (Cloud Transformation Advisor) to enable decision makers to identify the most suitable cloud transformation solution to satisfy their business goals based on a well-structured cloud transformation knowledge base. © 2012 IEEE.