Technical objectives (see Figure 2) consisted of two criteria: Scalability and Migration—Technical Complexity.
i.Scalability includes speed, latency and reliability. This criterion would pertain to the company’s current technical architecture and to which cloud service strategy would create the best scalability for the business. Scalability is a criterion all businesses must consider when deciding on a cloud service strategy.
ii.Migration—Technical Complexity pertains to the company’s current technical architecture and to which cloud service strategy would allow for the most efficient migration to the cloud. Migration can be a very costly endeavor with little Return on Investment (ROI) if it is not evaluated properly. Examples include trying to move existing services to a cloud service strategy that does not support current infrastructure.
2.Security criteria: Security objectives consisted of two criteria: Protection and Migration—Compliance to New Standards.
i.Protection refers to security measures in regard to data center protection (e.g., building, fire, surveillance, etc.), communication protection (e.g., data encryption, secure cryptographic protocols, firewall, etc.) and operation protection (e.g., access control, role management, virus protection, etc.).
ii.Migration — Compliance to New Standards is a method that will help companies to avoid being fined for compliance violations, and to manage risk factors as well as processes and decision rights. Examples include cloud encryption standards (FIPS 140-2), Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security standard and identity management that monitor application access and authorization.
3.Economic criteria: Economic objectives consisted of two criteria: Service Charge and Migration — Costs.
i.Service Charge defines how the cloud service strategy is charged. Examples include volume-based, time-based and account-based. This criterion also considers the available booking concept, such as pay-per-use, subscription fee and market-based prices.
ii.Migration — Costs refers to the costs to consider when moving existing infrastructure to the specified cloud service model.
4.Management criteria: Management objectives consisted of two criteria: Support Capabilities and Migration — Business Complexity.
i.Support Capabilities refer to the support offered and the mechanism (e.g., phone, online, etc.) it is under. This includes information such as multilingual support, worldwide offices and local contact options.
ii.Migration — Business Complexity defines the business complexity in migrating the business from its current solution to the cloud service strategy. This includes all management functionality including training time and the ease of moving employees over to the new platform.
5.4.Strategy
The Strategy of this model refers to the cloud service strategy a company should use. To limit the scope of this project, cloud service strategies were narrowed down to the three most common cloud service strategies—IaaS, SaaS and PaaS—that companies move their services to.
It is important to note this model and strategy do not encompass all the different cloud service providers within a specific cloud service strategy. A different model would need to be created to evaluate a specific provider within a cloud strategy option. Choosing a cloud service strategy will greatly narrow the scope of decisions a company must consider when moving their services to the cloud.
6.Results and Discussions
Our expert panel consisted of seven experts—five team members acting as executives from BMF LLC and two external cloud service consultants. All seven members completed the pairwise comparisons on all three levels.
We conducted two rounds of analysis on the results from the HDM tool. In the first round, we took into account the inputs from the seven experts on all three levels of the pairwise comparisons. Since we have explanations on our Mission, Objectives and Criteria in the online HDM tool, we assumed that all the experts knew the company’s needs, as well as the technical aspects of all the different types of cloud services.
The results of our first-round analysis show that Security is the company’s top concern, among all of its objectives, when migrating its information technology to cloud servers. Among its criteria, Protection, Scalability and Service Charge were ranked as the top three. These are the criteria the company should pay close attention to when making decisions. Also, IaaS was the preferred cloud service with a score of 0.35. SaaS came in second with a close score of 0.34. Even though IaaS was the winning choice of cloud service, there is no major differentiation between IaaS and SaaS because of their close scores. This makes the decision inconclusive.
Considering the suggestions and recommendations during our class presentation, we conducted a second round of analysis on the model and pairwise comparison data. In this round, we separated the inputs of the team members and the external experts: inputs from the five team members were used for Level 1 and Level 2 comparisons, while the inputs from the two external experts were used for Level 3 comparisons.
The reason for the second round of analysis is that the executives understand the company’s Mission, Objectives and Criteria under each objective. They are not technical experts and may not be able to make sound decisions on the third level of alternatives. As for the external cloud experts, although they are versed in the technical details of the three types of cloud service alternatives, they are not familiar with the inner workings of the company since they are not members. The results of the second round of analysis show that Security remains the top concern of the company when migrating to the cloud. Scalability, Protection and Service Charge again ranked as the top three among all the criteria, albeit with minor differences in actual weights. IaaS came out as the winner again with a score of 0.38, while SaaS came in as the second choice with a score of 0.32. The difference between the IaaS and SaaS strategies is more significant as compared to the first round. IaaS is the clear winner. We believe that the result from the second round of comparison is more convincing.
Detailed HDM model comparison results and our analysis are discussed in the following sections of this report.
6.1.First round of analysis
All seven experts were asked to make the pairwise comparison of all objectives, criteria and alternatives. Their pairwise comparison results were counted towards the final decision.
The Level 1 comparison results show that Security is the company’s top concern among all objectives when migrating to the cloud (see Table 1). This is due to the nature of BMF’s business sector. As the company is an online retail company, it has lots of confidential customer identification and finance information, as well as online transaction information. These information needs to be kept at the highest level of privacy. Any leakage could be fatal to the company’s reputation and might be subject to fines if any online financial transaction related to the federal compliance code is violated.
Migration is ranked as the least significant objective. This shows that the company is confident in its management ability, especially within its IT department. Some of the IT management team members have previous experience in cloud migration and are familiar with the process. The company is least concerned over managing the migration.
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