Edinburgh Napier University

  Cloud computing has gained immense momentum during recent years and has ultimately become a viable solutions not only for larger firms, but also for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). For smaller companies to stay competitive, many have therefore decided in favour of adapting cloud solutions. Given the multitude of issues and challenges that occur during the cloud migration phase, this work proposes a novel framework that helps SMEs to master migration related impediments. Firstly, the work takes into account SME specific requirements and articulates their importance during the cloud provider selection phase. The elicitation results demonstrate that factors such as security, reliability, cost, performance as well as flexibility and service and support have a pivotal role to play and require close attention. Secondly, decisive attributes were defined that qualify business components and services as cloud-fit. Finally, the framework itself was proposed, which focuses on a systematic service-oriented approach and helps companies to analyse their existing business processes in the course of cloud migration. The framework was verified in its practicability using a concrete scenario and a subsequent prototypical cloud implementation.