Strategies for Evaluating Cloud System Providers during the Transformation of Businesses

Abstract

This chapter takes a comprehensive look at the strategies and mechanisms developed for evaluating cloud services during business transformation. During business transformation, enterprises need to make decisions that would have long lasting impacts on the performance and profitability of the businesses. One of the important decisions business leaders are required to make is whether to own and manage their own IT infrastructure or outsource them from a public cloud provider. Due to the attractiveness of cloud computing, there are many cloud providers in the market creating a confusion in the minds of the customers who to select. Hence it is necessary to use proper strategies and mechanisms to evaluate the performance and the suitability of the service providers in meeting the customer requirements. This chapter takes an in depth look at some of the strategies, frameworks, mechanisms and tools proposed by researchers for evaluating cloud services in the literature with reference to their applicability, suitability, advantages and disadvantages.