authors have created the HDM model, which may be used as a basis for cloud service strategy decision-making at a wide variety of companies. This implementation of the model has been designed for a fictional company, Best Men’s Fashion (BMF) LLC, and the pairwise comparison judgments are based solely upon the priorities of that company.
Keywords: Technology assessment, infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, software as a service.
1.Introduction
The cloud service strategy Hierarchical Decision Model (HDM) model was developed using four levels of criteria. The first level—Mission Level—was crafted to “determine the model of cloud service strategy for the company”. In the second level called the Objective Level, criteria were gathered from a literature review and the opinions of experts. The four objectives in this level are Technical, Security, Economic and Management. To limit the scope of this project as well as to keep the expert pairwise comparison data points manageable, the team focused on two criteria per objective in the third level. So, the criteria of the Security objective are Protection and Migration: Compliance, Scalability and Migration: Technical Complexity for the Technical objective, Service Charges and Migration: Costs for the Economic objective, and Support Capabilities and Migration: Business Complexity for the Management objective. The last level contains three cloud service strategies—Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)—for the HDM to compare.
This model evaluation had two panels of experts. The first panel, which evaluated the priorities of the objectives and criteria in relationship to the mission, comprised five members of the Best Men’s Fashion (BMF) LLC executive team who were project team members acting on behalf of the company. These experts had direct knowledge of BMF’s strengths and weaknesses and could make decisions on what they thought would be best for the company. The second panel consisted of two external experts with significant cloud strategy experience. This panel was tasked with evaluating each of the strategies in relation to the third level criteria. Since they had no knowledge of BMF’s internal climate and (fictional) situation with IT staffing, they did not participate in the upper tier evaluation.
There were two rounds of analysis in the HDM modeling tool. The first round was negated as it took in all seven of the experts’ opinions into account for all tiers. This round was inconclusive in determining a cloud strategy, so their opinions were critiqued in class, revaluated by the team, and then redeveloped into a new strategy. The second round was crafted in the same way, with the experts divided into business and cloud expertise and who were only allowed to influence tiers on which they had extensive knowledge.
Scalability, Protection and Service Charges were top-ranked concerns among all the criteria in both the first and second rounds. As a result, the team is highly confident that these are the most important criteria a company should evaluate when choosing a cloud strategy.
The results of the second round were more conclusive when compared to the first round results with regard to the strategy choice. In the first round, there was little differentiation between the scores of the strategies, although IaaS was a slight leader. In the second and more focused round, IaaS ranked most successfully with a score of 0.38. SaaS was second with a score of 0.32 and PaaS came in last with 0.30. Clearly, IaaS would be a sound choice for BMF. The company could now move on to comparing just IaaS vendors.
This model can also be used for the decision processes of other companies in the same situation. These companies would need to complete a pairwise comparison round of “mission to objective” and “objective to criteria” with their business leaders. If changes in the market are not great, the cloud expert’s judgment of the criteria to strategy could be reused to save time. However, if the cloud market has changed greatly, then the cloud expert tier should be re-evaluated before making conclusions.
Moving to the cloud is a daunting prospect for any company, large or small. In addition to choosing which Internet Service Provider (ISP) to align with, the company must first determine a strategy of where they should house their data, codebase and business processes during the migration. It must also determine which of their business systems should be targeted for the cloud. Concerns about data placement (on-premise or off-premise?) or a hybrid placement must be considered before engaging an ISP.
This paper will now describe the three broad types of internet service strategies: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, as well as present an HDM structure for choosing a service strategy.
The goal of this paper was to create an HDM model that other companies could use as a basis for their decision-making. This model was designed, in particular, for a fictional company, BMF LLC, and the value judgments are based solely upon the priorities of a small company with limited staff, retail and supply chain websites, and the need to focus on its core business.
2.Company Profile
BMF LLC is a 3-year-old start-up headquartered in Portland, Oregon. In addition to its Portland office, the company also has locations in China and Mexico, which are primarily focused on manufacturing.
BMF is set up to be a luxury fashion online retailer that will style and groom male executives who desire to look great at work. This company will send a pre-selected and ready-to-wear outfit to the customer, who can then choose to send unwanted items back at no cost. BMF also has an online retail presence that is hosted on a premise with several servers dedicated to the supply chain, including custom applications for their stylists.
The company is currently funded by venture capital and has ramped up to 100 employees. Of those employees, there are two IT support staff, five developers and one IT manager. The IT manager and support staff handle both the server support for the website and supply chain software, as well as employee hardware and software issues. Collaboration cloud software has been used in this company since it was funded, and support for this is included in software support. The IT manager spends 50% of his time as a support staff and thus would like to have more time to focus on IT strategy instead.
The five developers consist of the following: a Python developer on internal tools that are custom to this company, two front-end developers for the website (and as needed on the tools’ User Interface (UI)), and two java and python developers to develop server side code for the website and supply chain integration.
3.IT Strategy and Considerations
The IT staff has come to the consensus that the following systems will be targeted to move to an off-premise cloud solution:
•Website—bestmensfashion.com—java and python.
•Supply chain servers with custom java and python applications.
Based on these targeted technology systems, this HDM project will evaluate the three cloud strategies (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS) and determine which one will be the most successful for BMF. Further evaluation, following the service type decision, will be needed to choose the right ISP vendor.
3.1.Benefits of cloud
The IT and Business staff have evaluated that the benefits of moving to the cloud are large with regard to long-term and on-demand scalability, which is needed due to business projections of 20% year on year growth of website traffic as well as seasonal demand that will cause fluctuations to the number of users. It is expected that website uptime will be increased after moving to a cloud model, due to failover and redundancy mechanisms.
An additional benefit is that the core business of creating the best experience
