cloud migration research paper

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

We're Hiring!
Help Center

Cloud Migration Research - A Systematic Literature Review

Related Papers

American Scientific Publishers

Muhammad Ehsan Rana

Legacy systems refer to the applications designed for a particular client that have been in use for a long period of time and developed using obsolete technologies. They are often business-critical systems, therefore any changes here inevitably will affect the other parts of the system. Although these systems are considered to be outdated but are too costly and risky for an organization to replace it. Cloud computing provides a new platform for organization that promises flexible scalability, business agility, high availability and reduction in costs. Considering these benefits, migration of legacy systems to cloud is a lucrative option for many organizations. However the architecture of these legacy applications require a tested, foolproof and risk free approach for migration. Limited migration models or frameworks have been proposed which caters issues of legacy systems migration to cloud platform. Many of these cloud adoption techniques and models emphasize on the generic phases and procedures on migrating the applications and data to cloud. However some of these models are more flexible, and provide better approaches compared to others. This research explores the issues associated with the legacy applications with regards to their migration on cloud and reviews the existing techniques and models that have been proposed in this context.

Dr. Mahdi Fahmideh

Moving mission-oriented enterprise applications to cloud environments is a major IT strategic task and requires a systematic approach. The foci of this paper are to review and examine existing cloud migration approaches from the process models perspective. To this aim, an evaluation framework is proposed and used to analyse and compare existing approaches for highlighting their features, similarities, and key differences. The survey distills the state of the art in cloud migration research and makes a rich inventory of important activities, recommendations, techniques, and concerns that are commonly involved in the migration process in one place. This enables academia and practitioners in the cloud computing community to get an overarching view of the cloud migration process. Furthermore, the survey identifies a number challenges that have not been yet addressed by existing approaches, developing opportunities for further research endeavors.

isaac odun-ayo

Cloud computing is a dynamic paradigm that is influencing activities in virtually all facets of the IT world. It has become quite easy to deploy applications on the cloud. Storage is also available based on user’s needs and can be scaled up or down as required by the user. Computing resources have also been made available on virtual machines. Furthermore, applications are available to users supplied by cloud providers. The activities on the cloud has made migration to the cloud desirable to most organizations and enterprises. Adopting the cloud is expected to reduce cost and the need for investment in computing infrastructure. However, most organizations are still concerned about the likely challenges of migrating to the cloud. The goal of this paper is to provide an insight into cloud computing with respect to migration issues. The paper discusses cloud computing and the benefits of migration. It also examines the challenges of migration. Furthermore, present issues of migration as...

International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications

akodad khali

Information Systems

Mustapha Hain

2018 UBT International Conference

Florinda Imeri

Samuel Chinenyeze

Recently, many organizations migrate their on-premise software systems to the cloud, driven by the benefits that cloud platforms offer. However, the emergence of coarse-grained and broad cloud migration frameworks, methods, processes and strategies have made a transparent migration of on-premise applications to the cloud a difficult, sometimes trial-and-error based endeavor. This paper suggests 15 fine-grained cloud migration patterns that (1) target multi-cloud settings, and (2) are specified with architectural notations. The proposed migration patterns are based on empirical evidence from a number of migration projects, best practices for cloud architec-tures and a systematic literature review of existing research. The patterns are stored in a repository, allowing an organization to (1) select appropriate patterns based on their objectives, (2) compose them to define a transparent migration plan, and (3) extend them based on the identification of new patterns by applying them to new contexts.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Samuel chinenyeze

Strategies and Methods for Cloud Migration

Published: 12 March 2015
Volume 11 , pages 143–152, ( 2014 )

Cite this article

Jun-Feng Zhao 1 &
Jian-Tao Zhou 1

25k Accesses

44 Citations

9 Altmetric

Explore all metrics

Legacy system migration to the cloud brings both great challenges and benefits, so there exist various academic research and industrial applications on legacy system migration to the cloud. By analyzing the research achievements and application status, we divide the existing migration methods into three strategies according to the cloud service models integrally. Different processes need to be considered for different migration strategies, and different tasks will be involved accordingly. The similarities and differences between the migration strategies are discussed, and the challenges and future work about legacy system migration to the cloud are proposed. The aim of this paper is to provide an overall presentation for legacy system migration to the cloud and identify important challenges and future research directions.

Model Based Migration of Cloud Systems: Review and Roadmap

An Overview of Approaches for the Migration of Applications to the Cloud

Cloud Migration Tools: Overview and Comparison

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

1 Introduction

Clouds are a large pool of easily usable and accessible virtualized resources such as hardware, development platforms, and services[ 1 ]. These resources can be dynamically re-configured to adjust to a variable load, allowing for optimal resource utilization[ 2 ]. According to the virtualized resources, three cloud service models emerged: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS)[ 3 – 5 ]. The business model of the cloud is pay-as-you-go, so enterprises can reduce capital expenditure by leveraging the cloud service[ 6 – 8 ]. Based on these characteristics, cloud computing provides many benefits needed by enterprise, such as no up-front investment, lower operating cost, high scalability, and so on[ 9 ]. Software migration is the process of switching from one operating environment to another that in most cases is considered to be better[ 10 ]. A legacy system is an outdated computer system that remains in use even after more modern technology has emerged either because the organization may have invested considerable time and money in it or the legacy system holds valuable data. In order to take advantage of cloud computing and protect the existing investment to legacy system, enterprise are eager to migrate legacy systems to the cloud. As a result, the study in academia and the practice in industry on migrating legacy systems to cloud computing are very widespread today.

So far, much research has been done in this field. Some works[ 11 – 15 ] focus on decision making support for cloud migration in enterprise, since benefits, risks, costs, and organizational and socio-technical factors must be considered before migration. More researchers concentrate on migration methods, mainly about how to efficiently migrate legacy system to the cloud[ 16 – 21 ]. Some organizations devote themselves to providing development tool for migrating legacy system to the cloud[ 22 – 25 ]. Up to now, some innovative methods have been proposed, related tools have been developed, and lots of organizations have made some trials in migrating legacy systems to cloud computing.

In this paper, we review the research achievements and application status on cloud migration, make a comprehensive analysis of existing migration methods, classify them into five migration strategies, and finally identify the corresponding considerations of each respective strategy. Migration strategy is used to classify cloud migration on the whole. According to the cloud service model, the migration to the cloud is classified into three strategies integrally in this paper. Different migration strategy focuses on different tasks, fits special migration scenarios and possesses characteristic virtues. To the practitioner of migration, the analytic results above will benefit them. In the end, we present some challenges and research topics for future, which may provide some guideline to the research beginner in cloud migration.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 , existing migration strategies are reviewed, and a classification is proposed. Section 3 surveys the existing methods of migration to IaaS and PaaS, and analyzes the similarities and differences of tasks in these two strategies. Section 4 investigates the work about migration to SaaS and compares the proposed migration strategies from different aspects. The related development tools are reviewed in Section 5 . Section 6 discusses the challenges and future research topics in cloud migration. Finally, the paper concludes in Section 7 .

2 Migration strategy

With regard to the migration classification, there exist different classification cases in different literature. Binz et al.[ 17 ] classified the migration into three types: Standardized Format Migration, Component Format Migration and Holistic Migration. The component implemented in standardized, self-contained format is migrated in Standardized Format Migration such as VMware or Open Virtualization is Format images. The format of the respective component transformed into another format in the second type, for example, transforming a virtual machine image or enabling the execution of scripting languages on PaaS. Holistic migration aims to realize migration to complete application built out of multiple components by migrating each component separately. According to the holistic migration, the authors proposed the cloud motion framework that could leverage existing application models and provide support to migrate composite applications to cloud[ 17 ]. Reference [ 18 ] identified four migration types that could cloud-enable applications by adaptation. The first type replaces components with cloud offerings, which is the least invasive type of migration. The second describes the case that migrates some of the application functionality to the cloud. The third is the classic migration case where the whole software stack of the application is migrated to the cloud. The last is complete migration of the application, which requires the migration of data and business logic for the cloud. While Gartner[ 26 ] suggests information technology (IT) organizations consider the following five options when they seek to move legacy systems to the cloud: rehost on infrastructure as a service, refactor for platform as a service, revise for IaaS or PaaS, rebuild on PaaS and replace with software as service. However, Cisco considers three application migration options including SaaS, PaaS and IaaS in white paper for migration of enterprise application to the cloud. They think the migration to SaaS is no longer an application migration but more of a replacement of the existing application with a SaaS. Migration to PaaS is an option for migrating business applications that are based on standard application server software such as JavaEE or .net platforms. Migration to IaaS involves deploying the application on the cloud service provider’s servers. In addition, the criteria that are used for considering every application migration are discussed[ 27 ]. Similarly, Solentive software proposed three main approaches for migrating legacy system to the cloud in a white paper, namely Iaas, PaaS and SaaS. The white paper looks at these approaches in detail and analyzes the benefits and disadvantages of each[ 28 ].

Through comparing and analyzing, we can categorize the migration into three strategies integrally: migration to IaaS, migration to PaaS and migration to SaaS. The first strategy implements migration only by porting legacy system to the cloud by using IaaS. The legacy system will be migrated to the cloud by system refactoring according to the platform of PaaS in the second strategy. As to the migration to SaaS, it can be divided into three sub-strategies concretely, namely replacing by SaaS, revising based on SaaS and reengineering to SaaS. To the first sub-strategy, legacy systems will be completely replaced by commercial software delivered as a cloud service. Based on the second sub-strategy, some functionality of legacy systems will be replaced by cloud service. To the third sub-strategy, legacy systems will be reengineered to cloud service. In reality, enterprises often migrate their legacy systems to cloud platform by adopting the first strategy. To this strategy, the migration is relatively easy to implement and has good cost-benefit. But the migration could not take full advantage of cloud platform. To the second strategy, legacy systems need to be adapted according to the target platform, which can bring disadvantages include missing capabilities, transitive risk, and framework lock-in. To the SaaS related strategy, if legacy system is replaced by commercial software delivered as a service, the migration effort will be reduced greatly and reengineering is unnecessary. When replacing some business logic with existing cloud service, the adaption to the legacy system is necessary. But to reengineer legacy system to cloud service, the related work will be very challenging, and may require reverse engineering, structure redesign, service generation, and so on. After comparing and analyzing, we map the migration methods mentioned above to these five specific strategies. The mapping result is showed in Table 1 .

The proposed strategies realize classification to cloud migration in essence, which can cover all migration cases. Through mapping existing migration methods to the proposed strategies, the migration methods can be better understood and compared explicitly.

3 Migration to IaaS and PaaS

3.1 migration to iaas.

Infrastructure as a service is a form of hosting, which includes network access, routing services, and storage. IaaS provider generally provides hardware and administrative services used to store applications and a platform for running applications. A virtual machine is built for an application, which is loaded with all the software that will eventually run in the cloud. Then the virtual machine is uploaded to IaaS vendor’s hosting environment and deployed to run. IaaS is the best choice for moving applications to the cloud when there is no time to reengineer the applications for a cloud[ 29 ].

With respect to migration method, cloud computing service providers, such as Amazon and Cisco, provide the details for migrating legacy systems to their platforms[ 27 , 30 ]. Zhang[ 31 ] conducted migration studies by migrating Hadoop and RUBiS to EC2 cloud platform.

Through experiments, the installation mistakes and configuration errors were identified as the two major sources of errors in migration. Then a migration management framework was proposed for providing the installation automation and configuration validation, which uses templates to simplify the largescale enterprise system installation process and uses policy to validate the configuration and monitor the configuration changes[ 31 ].

Besides technology domain need to be taken into account, there are a number of factors to weigh before migrating legacy system to IaaS such as meaningful prerequisites, financial and legal considerations, culture shift, and so on. If these conditions cannot be satisfied, migration of legacy system to IaaS will be harder[ 32 ]. By presenting the result of a case study that investigated the migration of an IT system from a company’s in-house data center to EC2, reference [ 16 ] discussed the implications of migrating legacy systems to the cloud from the perspective of an enterprise or organization. In addition to the benefits of using the cloud, the significant risks, such as deterioration of customer care and service quality, increased dependence on external third party, lack of supporting resources, and so on, will come up. Enterprise decision-makers should consider the overall organizational implications of the changes brought by migrating legacy system to the cloud, so they can avoid implementing local optimizations at the cost of organization-wide performance.

Many general instructions have been proposed to provide guidance for application migration to IaaS. For example, Kothari and Arumugam[ 33 ] introduced guidelines to assess the feasibility of migrating applications to the cloud and suggested a general migration strategy for applications. Sattaluri[ 34 ] discussed different aspects that need to be considered during the application migration to IaaS. While Yunus[ 35 ] presented costs and risks of application migration to IaaS, Mossburg listed four important points that lead to a successful cloud migration. These works provide general instructions for migration to IaaS. Reference [ 36 ] gave further details about what to do and how to do for application migration to IaaS. The existing research mentioned above can be divided into two aspects on the whole, namely migration method and migration decision. We present Table 2 to show the focus of the existing research.

In short, users have full privileges on the allocated virtual machine (VM) in migration to IaaS. They could do anything to the VM, but there is something need to be considered before conducting migration:

Dynamic resource requirement.

Restriction to data storage location.

Requirement of special hardware devices.

Amount of data stream.

3.2 Migration to PaaS

Platform as a service is an application development and deployment platform delivered as a service to developers over the web, which provide the hardware plus a certain amount of application software such as databases, middleware, and development tools. Migration based on PaaS is not mandatory for resource management, but it is required to make the legacy system compatible to the requirement of PaaS provider.

Microsoft, Cisco, and Solentive provide guide for migration to PaaS from technology domain[ 27 , 37 , 38 ], but these guidelines are restricted to the PaaS they provide and not applicable to other general cases. For the general cases, reference [ 36 ] specified further checking steps for application migration to PaaS, including programming language, database, restrictions and limitations of the selected PaaS besides checking specific requirements related to hardware, software and input data as discussed in migration to IaaS. Furthermore, the general solutions to solve incompatibility issues of database migration were discussed. Tran et al.[ 39 ] defined the scope of migration software system for the cloud. They identified all activities in migration that start from getting familiar with the application, the target cloud platform, and the third party tool, then to build the environment and get ready for migration, as well as to modify and test to ensure that the application properly runs in the cloud. Finally based on the experience of migrating PetShop. Net to Windows Azure and migrating Java Pet Store to Amazon EC2, they compared the difference between migrating legacy system to PaaS and to IaaS.

In brief, PaaS supplies a complete cloud IT stack for software development and delivery, which makes it possible to build “true” cloud applications and release them in a scalable and elastic environment. Moreover, it also produces numerous restrictions at every technology layer of the application stack:

Programming language.

Middleware.

Third party library.

Restriction of the selected PaaS.

4 Migration related SaaS and comparison among strategies

SaaS is a software delivery model in which software and associated data are centrally hosted on the cloud. SaaS is typically accessed by users using a thin client via a web browser, which has many advantages over the traditional software delivery model. The recurring revenue stream, simpler maintenance and application update, and the lower cost of delivery and distribution are especially attractive for both application provider and end users. These advantages are driving a growing number of organizations of all sizes to adopt SaaS solutions in order to achieve their business objectives.

The migration strategy through replacing legacy system by SaaS does not refer to reengineering the legacy system, and the only work needs to be done is to export local data to the cloud database. For the migration strategy of revising based on SaaS, some functionality of legacy system will be outsourced to the cloud, and then the business process is used to integrate cloud and non-cloud services. There are significant advances in service and data integration[ 40 , 41 ] and service composition[ 42 , 43 ] in service oriented architecture (SOA). For the migration strategy of reengineering to SaaS, SOA and Cloud need to be considered jointly. The SOA and Cloud are enabling technologies for each other. SOA decomposes the whole architecture into coarse-grain components providing business services. The scalability and possibility to multiply more instances of one component can be obtained by decomposing the architecture, which fits rightly to the Cloud deployment paradigm. On the contrary, due to network latencies in the cloud environment, developer must ensure that the application can run on a set of low performance resources. This necessitates decomposition and decoupling of the application architecture, which is similar to SOA paradigm. So, SOA and Cloud are perfectly complementary. SOA provides the guideline for making the software architecture scalable, while Cloud enables deployment of architecture scale[44]. So the convergence of cloud computing and SOA supports the development of SaaS. When reengineering a legacy system to SaaS, migrating the system to SOA necessitates in general. Reference [ 45 ] stated that recasting existing systems into services is a prerequisite to move towards cloud computing.

4.1 Migration to SOA

SOA is a set of principles and methodologies for designing and developing software in the form of interoperable services. These services are well-defined business functionalities and built as software components that can be reused for different purposes. SOA can expose the functionality of the legacy systems as services, presumably without making significant changes to the legacy systems, so migration of legacy system to service-oriented environments has significant value. So far researchers have paid much attention to migration of legacy systems to SOA. A lot of migration methods have been proposed, which can be roughly classified into three perspectives. The first concentrates on planning the migration. The feasibility of migration process is assessed based on business drivers and characteristics of legacy system. The second focuses on implementing the migration which usually covers techniques to adapt a segment of legacy code to web services. The last perspective aims for fulfilling the whole migration process that is comprised of two major steps: forward service development and reverse service extraction.

The representative work of the first perspective is service migration and reuse technique (SMART). Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute developed SMART to help organizations make initial decisions about the feasibility of reusing legacy components as services within an SOA environment. SMART considers the specific interactions that will be required by target SOA environment and any changes that must be made to the legacy components[ 46 ]. Reference [ 47 ] presented an overview of the application reengineering decisions in SOA, which identified the key issues involved in each decision, and proposed a decision model for application reengineering for SOA.

Zhang et al. [ 48 ] proposed an architecture-based service-oriented approach to modernize legacy system in a service-based computing environment. The approach emphasizes service identification and packaging. The modernization of the legacy system is implemented in five steps, including legacy system evaluation, architecture recovery, service identification, service packaging and service publication; Oldevik et al. [ 49 ] proposed a model-driven approach for migrating legacy systems to service-oriented architecture. The migration strategy is implemented by wrapping existing legacy components. Unified modeling language (UML) is used to specify migration models, or wrappers, that are fed to model-driven code generators to generate a deployable service. The migration approach was tested on an oil drift prediction system by modeling and generating the services and wrappers required for integration with the various legacy components[ 49 ]. These works does not involve re-factoring or re-engineering, they only focus on the implementation of migration by wrapping.

Reference [ 50 ] proposed a service-oriented software reengineering (SoSR) methodology that can be applied to reengineer a legacy software system into a service-oriented software system. The methodology is formed by a set of best practices that is architecture-centric, service-oriented, role-specific, and model-driven. Winter and Ziemann[ 51 ] proposed an approach toward migrating legacy systems to service oriented architectures by relating the intended enterprise model to the legacy software system. The approach is model-based, where appropriate models represent software artifacts on all levels of abstraction. The activities in the migration process, such as reverse engineering, enterprise modeling, forward engineering, and legacy migration, rely on these models that serve as base for extracting abstractions or transformations. These approaches cover the whole migration process.

Although there is much work on SOA migration, they mainly differ in the way they provide solutions for two key problems, namely what can be migrated and how the migration is performed. In order to understand, compare, and analyze the existing methods, a conceptual framework for SOA migration was proposed by Maryam Razavian and Patricia Lago, which provides a holistic illustration of the SOA migration process, along with the distinct conceptual elements of the process. SOA-MF addresses the question of “what does the migration of legacy systems to SOA entail”. The migration process follows the horseshoe model by first recovering the lost abstractions and eliciting the legacy fragments that are suitable for migration to SOA, then altering and reshaping the legacy abstractions to the service based abstractions, and finally renovating the target system based on transformed abstractions as well as new requirements. It could be performed at different levels of abstraction ranging from “code-level” to “enterprise-level” [ 52 ]. After analyzing the migration approaches mentioned above according to SOA-MF, we present Table 3 that maps them to the abstraction tiers described in SOA-MF.

4.2 Migration related SaaS

In order to provide some guidance on modifying architecture of a service-based system for cloud computing, Babar and Chauhan[ 20 ] revealed some insights when they undertook a research and development project aimed at modernizing an open source software framework, Hackystat, for leveraging the flexibility and scalability of the cloud computing paradigm. In the process of migration, the key requirements that can be migrated to the cloud are identified firstly. Having identified the key requirements, the next task is to analyze those requirements in the context of the existing architecture in order to gain a good understanding of the kinds of architectural change needed to be made. Finally, the architecture will be modified in accordance with the identified architecture change. Because this work focused on the migration of the service-based system to cloud computing platform, it did not involve reverse engineering.

Zhang et al.[ 19 ] proposed a generic methodology to guide how to migrate legacy system to cloud platform. The generic methodology includes the following steps: representation of the legacy application, redesign the architecture model with identified services, model driven architecture (MDA) transformation, web service generation, invocation of legacy functionalities, selection of a suitable cloud computing platform, and provision of cloud web service to the end users. This seven-step methodology guides developers to migrate legacy systems step by step and improves the productivity and effectiveness of migration.

In addition to the migration methodology, some research on the implementation of migration to SaaS was carried out. Current approaches are often limited to specific cloud environments or do not provide automated support for the alignment with a cloud environment. Frey and Hasselbring[ 53 ] proposed a model-based approach Cloud-MIG for migrating legacy software system to scalable and resource-efficient cloud-based application. CloudMig concentrates on the SaaS provider perspective and facilitates the migration of enterprise software system towards generic IaaS and PaaS-based cloud environment. CloudMIG can generate considerable parts of a resource-efficient target architecture utilizing a rule-based heuristics, so it helps SaaS providers to semi-automatically migrate existing software to the cloud computing platform. Li[ 21 ] looked into the migration towards the cloud in his dissertation for master’s degree. The research focuses on the derivation of legacy structure, the redesign of the system structure and deployment of the redesigned system. A framework MOMISC was presented, which offers a set of solutions and tools to support migrating existing systems to the cloud. Based on the framework, a hotel booking application was migrated to EC2 for verifying the feasibility of the framework.

Through investigation of existing research, reuse and migration of legacy applications to interoperable cloud services (REMICS), a research project supported by the European Commission that started in 2010 for a period of three years, has identified further work that needs to be done in the project. Specifically, knowledge discovery involves business and rule recovery that are necessary for identifying services and designing new business processes except reverse engineering of legacy code. Comprehensive methodology is employed to address dedicated design patterns and transformations, especially for migration to the cloud. Migration tools and methods need integration with model-based development methods. PIM for SOA and cloud computing can adapt many different platforms in the cloud and diverging technologies. These problems have been partially addressed by developing methods, languages, transformations and tools. The REMICS methodology will integrate all these in an agile, model-driven, and service-oriented methodology for modernizing legacy systems in the end. The migration starts with the recover activity which extracts the architecture of the legacy application. The recover activity is implemented by knowledge discovery and reverse engineering. The source architecture helps to analyze the legacy system, identify the best ways for migration, and benefit from model-driven engineering technologies for generation of the new system. The migrate activity reforms the source architecture into target architecture for service cloud platform. In migration activities, SOA and cloud computing patterns are applied, legacy components may be replaced or wrapped, architecture may be redesigned by service composition. After obtaining target architecture, the service cloud implementation is achieved by MDA. In short, REMICS proposes a leap progress in legacy systems migration to service clouds, which significantly improves thebaselineADM concept[ 44 , 54 – 56 ]. This project involves the most advanced research in migrating legacy system to service cloud now.

In summary, migration to SaaS requires to consider the specific migration strategy according to legacy system and existing SaaS. If existing SaaS has the same business functionality of legacy system, users can replace legacy system by SaaS. When some business functionality has been realized by existing SaaS, legacy system can be modernized by revising legacy system based on existing SaaS. Users can take full advantage of the virtue of the cloud by reengineering legacy system to SaaS, but the challenge cannot be ignored.

4.3 Comparison between the migration strategies

The most ideal strategy for a special migration to the cloud relies on the individual needs of each organization and the condition of the legacy system, so organizations need to choose the most rational strategy before the migration. With the PaaS strategy, organizations need to determine the extent of modifications required for the application to be compatible with the cloud platform. If extensive modifications are needed for PaaS, the IaaS strategy may be a better choice. As an effective software-delivery mechanism, SaaS could be an ideal choice for independent software vendors, but the challenge for reengineering to SaaS is obvious. Through integral analysis, we present Table 4 to compare the characteristics of these five migration strategies.

5 Related development tools

MoDisco is a generic and extensible open source reverse engineering solution, which intensively uses MDE principles and techniques to improve existing approaches for reverse engineering. In comparison to many development tools that focus on UML generation from a specific technology and vice versa, MoDisco provides generic support for different target meta models and extensibility to other technologies[ 22 ]. MoDisco supports four use-cases of existing software modernization. The first use-case is quality assurance which aims at verifying whether an existing system meets the required qualities. The second is documentation which focuses on the extraction of information from an existing system to help understand one aspect of the system. The third is improvement which concentrates on transformation of an existing system to integrate better coding norms or design patterns. The last is migration which implements transformation to the component, the framework, the language, or the architecture of legacy system. In each case, modernizing an existing software system includes three phases. Firstly the information should be extracted out of the artifacts of the system. Then the extracted information will be understood in order to take good modernization decisions. Finally the information is transformed to new artifacts which may be metrics, document, code and so on[ 23 ].

Blu Age is another agile solution for application modernization which focuses on extracting legacy architecture into a PIM presentation and regenerates it to a modernized system using MDA approach. Blu Age application is based on three complementary products. Blu Age reverse modeling extracts the business code of legacy application and transforms it into UML2 model independent of any technology. Blu Age database modernization migrates database technologies by modernizing data and strengthening their integrity. Blu Age forward engineering generates applications by compiling UML2 models. Blu Age engineering automates 100% of the developments and reduces costs significantly[ 24 ].

Modelio is an open source modeling environment which supports SoaML, the SOA architecture modeling standard, with specific editors dedicated to SOA architecture modeling and architecture implementation model generation. Modelio’s core architecture is based on a meta-meta infrastructure. The core architecture supports extensibility mechanisms, notably for UML profile definition, and provides the concept of modules, which package extensions and can be dynamically applied to or withdrawn from an existing model[ 25 ].

Modisco and Blu Age are both ADM compliant case tools which can extract architecture model from legacy system. The extracted model will be the start point of the following forward engineering. Modelio imports the recovered system model and generates SOA models through componentization and refactoring. SOFTTEAM developed a series of migration tools based Modelio environment. Now the link between Blu Age and Modelio is fully functional.

6 Challenges and future work

Based on the above comparison and analysis, we identified the following challenges that could be research topics in the future.

1) Holistic methodology

Up to now, the existing research mostly focused on the consideration of a special migration approach. A holistic methodology of migrating legacy systems to the cloud is needed. Firstly, the migration of legacy systems to the cloud should be divided into reasonable types, the Cloud providers and legacy systems should be classified, too. Then, according to a specific kind of legacy system, the selection of Cloud providers, the migration type to be applied, and the required adaption for the migration should be made. At the same time, the advantages and risks accompanying the migration should be advertised. Based on the information, organizations can make decision to migration strategy. Finally, the methodology should propose adaption processes in accordance with the given migration. With the guidance of this holistic methodology, organization can efficiently migrate legacy systems to the cloud, rather than hesitate about what to do and how to do when facing a migration task.

2) Scalability in IaaS

For the migration to IaaS, if the amount of resources required by the application is stable, it is unnecessary to adapt the application for migration. However, for some applications, resource requirements might vary significantly from time to time, organization must implement a new resource management component so that resources could be acquired and released automatically on demands. This component can efficiently optimize resource consumption in the cloud. The discussion on how to realize resource management is absent at present, so related solutions should be identified to solve this problem.

3) Usage of essential cloud characteristics

For the migration to PaaS, in addition to the adaption to programming languages, databases and third-party components, organization needs to consider redesigning some business processes in order to exploit essential cloud characteristics. For example, PaaS provides MapReduce programming model which is a simple data-parallel programming model designed for scalability and fault-tolerance. MapReduce can automatically parallelize and execute the program on a large cluster of commodity machines. When the legacy system involves processing of large data sets, the related business process needs to be redesigned for migration in accordance with MapReduce programming model. Nevertheless, existing work have not paid enough attention to take full advantage of the essential cloud characteristics.

4) Architecture refactoring

To reengineer legacy system to SaaS, the architecture of existing legacy applications need to be refactored using design patterns for SOA and cloud computing. SOA and cloud computing technologies complement each other. SOA enables software architecture better scalability and reuse of application components. While the Cloud computing addresses the deployment architecture that easily scale. SOA has been paid much attention for several years, and currently it is in an established state. On the contrary, there is little research in cloud design pattern due to the novelty of the domain.

5) Integrated development environment

For the migration to SaaS, it refers to an integral reengineering. Good tools are prerequisite to successful execution of a job. An integrated development environment can promote migration efficiency, which should incorporate model recovery tool, migration process tool, component recovery tool, pattern composition tool and service generation tool. Model recovery tool is used to extract model from the legacy system. Migration process tool offers support for the approach of migrating legacy systems to SOA application deployed on cloud computing platforms. The component recovery tool is responsible for component identification, discovery of services, interfaces and dependencies. The pattern composition tool adopts SOA and cloud computing design patterns to source architecture, which implements the iterative refactoring of legacy architecture to the targeted service cloud architecture. Service generation tool automates the target code framework or target code generation according to MDA. A series of tools are planned to be developed in REMICS, and some have been released. Since the links between these development tools are mostly manual, the integration between them is necessary. Otherwise more outstanding tools are beneficial to facilitate the migration of legacy systems to SaaS.

6) Other research topics

Besides migrating legacy system from traditional environments to cloud platforms, application migration between cloud platforms may be necessary in the future. So how to migrate applications from one cloud platform to another will be a research topic. In addition, testing strategies need to be studied to verify whether the generated system after migration has the same functionality and better performance as before.

7) Our ongoing work

Now we are focusing on migrating a workflow management system to cloud platform Aneka. Through migration, the existing workflow management system running in the in-house data center will be provided as SaaS to end users. The target workflow system will concentrate on scientific computing on large data, which can take full advantage of the virtue of the cloud. In the migration process, the essential cloud characteristics will be considered adequately. For example, Mapreduce programming model can be adopted to implement parallel processing of big data and to analyze the execution log of workflow system. In order to achieve the aforementioned objectives, we will employ reengineering to SaaS to carry out the system migration, and further explore the reengineering to SaaS and try to propose some innovative methods. The key work and challenges involved are as follows:

i) Software structure recovery

The workflow management system is implemented using an object-oriented language. We will discover the static model of this system using Modisco. After obtaining the static model, the classes will be grouped into layers through a link analysis algorithm, which usually include user interface layer, business logic layer, and data access layer. Because the business process of a system is realized in logic layer, the business logic layer needs to be further analyzed for service identification in migrating legacy system to SaaS. To further analyzing the logic layer, special clustering algorithm will be adopted for extracting function modules in legacy systems. By adopting the orthogonal structure analysis method, the obtained function modules through software structure recovery will be more accurate service candidates.

ii) Service identification

For the target service, we will conduct analysis from two aspects, namely, target system requirement and legacy system implementation. Based on requirement analysis of the target workflow system, some business functions will be identified which are appropriate for providing as services. The function modules in the legacy system implementation have been discovered in the first step. Based on these works, we will match the business functions with the function modules. The candidate services in legacy system and new services will be found. As a result, the function modules in legacy system can be efficiently reused.

iii) Model refactoring

After service identification, we need to refactor the existing software architecture to integrate them. Moreover, for some special candidate services such as those related to processing the big data, we need to recover the dynamic model of their implementation in the legacy system. Through analyzing the dynamic model we will find the business logic that can be improved by the virtue of cloud computing and adapt the dynamic model. Then, we will reimplement the business process based on the cloud programming model so that the target system can take full advantage of the cloud characteristics.

Finally, we explicitly describe the research status on cloud migration by Fig. 1 . The coordinate x represents migration strategies, and the coordinate y describes the related research corresponding to the specific migration strategies. The existing research fields are denoted by solid graph elements, and the unresolved research fields by hollow elements.

The distribution of related research

7 Conclusion

Software migration is the process of moving legacy systems from one operation environment to another, that is, in most cases, thought to be better. Migrating legacy system to cloud computing can effectively protect software assets and take advantage of cloud computing. Many research projects have been carried out, and some innovative methods and tools have been proposed so far. By investigating the existing literature, we classify the migration into five strategies, then review and compare the related researches on every migration strategy. In addition, related development tools are surveyed. Based on the existing research achievements and application status, some future work are identified including holistic methodology, redesign and adaption to application for special migration, architecture refactoring, integrated development environment, and so on. Besides, we notice the most advanced research in migration of legacy software to cloud computing has been performed in REMICS, so some further work in this research field should be carried out based on the achievement obtained in this project.

L. M. Vaquero, L. Rodero-Merino, J. Caceres, M. Lindner. A break in the clouds: Towards a cloud definition. ACM Sigcomm Computer Communication Review , vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 50–55, 2008.

J. Geelan. Twenty Experts Define Cloud Computing, [On-line], Available: http://cloudcomputing.syscon.com , July 18, 2008.

M. Armbrust, A. Fox, R. Griffith, A. D. Joseph, R. H. Katz, A. Konwinski, G. Lee, D. A. Patterson, A. Rabkin, I. Stoica, M. Zaharia. Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing, Technical Report, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, 2009.

Google Scholar

R. Buyya, C. S. Yeo, S. Venugopal. Market-oriented cloud computing: Vision, hype, and reality for delivering it services as computing utilities. In Proceedings of the International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications , IEEE, Dalian, China, pp. 5–13, 2008.

C. Y. Low, Y. Chen, M. C. Wu. Understanding the determinants of cloud computing adoption. Industrial Management & Data Systems , vol. 111, no. 7, pp. 1006–1023, 2011.

Article Google Scholar

G. Gruman, E. Knorr. What cloud computing really means , [Online], Available: http://www.infoworld.com , July 18, 2013.

Roy Bragg. Cloud Computing: When Computers Really Do Rule, [Online], Available: http://www.technewsworld.com , July 16, 2008.

P. Watson, P. Lord, F. Gibson, P. Periorellis, G. Pitsilis. Cloud computing for e-science with Carmen. In Proceedings of the 2nd Iberian Grid Infrastructure Conference Proceedings , Porto, Portugal, pp. 3–14, 2008.

G. Zhang, L. Cheng, R. Boutaba. Cloud computing: State-of-the-art and research challenges. Journal of Internet Services and Applications , vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 7–18, 2010.

Definition Migration, [Online], Available: http://searchcio.techtarget.com , July 17, 2013.

A. Khajeh-Hosseini, I. Sommerville, J. Bogaerts, P. Teregowda. Decision support tools for cloud migration in the enterprise. In Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD) , IEEE, Washington, DC, USA, pp. 541–548, 2011.

A. Khajeh-Hosseini, D. Greenwood, J. W. Smith, L. Sommerville. The cloud adoption toolkit: Supporting cloud adoption decisions in the enterprise. Software: Practice and Experience , vol. 42, no. 4, pp. 447–465, 2012.

C. Ward, N. Aravamudan, K. Bhattacharya, K. Cheng. Workload migration into clouds challenges, experiences, opportunities. In Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD) , IEEE, Miami, FL, USA, pp. 164–171, 2010.

Cloud Adoption Assessment, [Online], Available: http://www.eduserv.org.uk , July 20, 2013.

M. Menzel, R. Ranjan. CloudGenius: decision support for web server cloud migration. In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on World Wide Web , ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp. 979–988, 2012.

A. Khajeh-Hosseini, D. Greenwood, I. Sommerville. Cloud migration: A case study of migrating an enterprise IT system to IaaS. In Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD) , IEEE, Miami, FL, USA, pp. 450–457, 2010.

T. Binz, F. Leymann, D. Schumm. CMotion: A framework for migration of applications into and between clouds. In Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing and Applications , IEEE, Irvine, CA, USA, pp. 1–4, 2011.

V. Andrikopoulos, T. Binz, F. Leymann, S. Strauch. How to adapt applications for the cloud environment. Computing , vol. 95, no. 6, pp. 1–43, 2013.

Article MathSciNet Google Scholar

W. G. Zhang, A. J. Berre, D. Roman, H. A. Huru. Migrating legacy applications to the service Cloud. In Proceedings of the 14th Conference Companion on Object Oriented Programming Systems Languages and Applications , pp. 59–68, 2009.

M. A. Babar, M. A. Chauhan. A tale of migration to cloud computing for sharing experiences and observations. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Software Engineering for Cloud Computing , ACM, New York, USA, pp. 50–56, 2011.

W. B. Li. Model Driven Migration of Legacy Systems to the Cloud, Master dissertation, Harbin Institute of Technology, China, 2010. (in Chinese)

H. Bruneliere, J. Cabot, F. Jouault, F. Madiot. MoDisco: A generic and extensible framework for model driven reverse engineering. In Proceedings of IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering , ACM, New York, USA, pp. 173–174, 2010.

MoDisco, [Online], Available: http://www.eclipse.org/MoDisco/ , July 22, 2012.

Blu Age Legacy Application Modernization, [Online], Available: http://www.bluage.com/en , July 23, 2012.

Modelio, [Online], Available: http://www.modelio.org , June 23, 2012.

5 Ways to Migrate Applications to the Cloud, [Online], Available: http://www.cioupdate.com , May 20, 2012.

Planning the Migration of Enterprise Applications to the Cloud, Cisco White paper, 2010.

Migrating to the Cloud 3 Main Approaches, Solentive White paper, 2011.

S. Bhardwaj, L. Jain, S. Jain. Cloud computing: A study of infrastructure as a service (IAAS). International Journal of Engineering and Information Technology , vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 60–63, 2010.

Migrating your Existing Applications to the AWS Cloud, Amazon White paper, 2010.

G. Zhang. Data and Application Migration in Cloud based Data Centers: Architectures and Techniques, Ph. D. dissertation, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, 2011.

Infrastructure as a Service, [Online], Available: http://www.educause.edu , July 20, 2013.

C. Kothari, A. K. Arumugam. Cloud application migration, [Online], Available: http://cloudcomputing.syscon.com/node/1458739 , July 12, 2010.

R. Sattaluri. Application migration considerations for cloud computing, [Online], Available: http://www.syscon.com/node/1686320 , January 28, 2011.

M. Yunus. Understanding enterprise-to-cloud migration costs and risks, [Online], Available: http://www.ebizq.net/topics/cloud_computing/features/12741.html , June 14, 2010.

G. H. Vu, R. Asal. Legacy application migration to the cloud: Practicability and methodology. In Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE Eighth World Congress on Services , IEEE, Washington, DC, USA, pp. 270–277, 2012.

Microsoft. Moving applications to the cloud on the Microsoft Windows Azure Platform. MSDN Magazine , pp. 68–73, March, 2013.

Microsoft. Tips for migrating your applications to the cloud. MSDN Magazine , pp. 36–45, August, 2010.

V. Tran, J. Keung, A. Liu, A. Fekete. Application migration to cloud: A taxonomy of critical factors. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Software Engineering for Cloud Computing , ACM, New York, USA, pp. 22–28, 2011.

H. R. M. Nezhad, B. Benatallah, F. Casati, F. Toumani. Web services interoperability specifications. Computer , vol. 39, no. 5, pp. 24–32, 2006.

A. Halevy, A. Rajaraman, J. Ordille. Data integration: The teenage years. In Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases , VLDB Endowment, pp. 9–16, 2006.

S. Dustdar, W. Schreiner. A survey on web services composition. International Journal of Web and Grid Services , vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 1–30, 2005.

A. Brogi, S. Corfini, R. Popescu. Semantics-based composition-oriented discovery of web services. ACM Transactions on Internet Technology , vol. 8, no. 4, Article 19, 2008.

State of the art on modernization methodologies, methods and tools , [Online], Available: http://www.remics.eu/publicdeliverables , July 20, 2013.

G. Canfora, M. D. Penta, L. Cerulo. Achievements and challenges in software reverse engineering. Communications of the ACM , vol. 54, no. 4, pp. 142–151, 2011.

G. Lewis, E. J. Morris, D. B. Smith, S. Simanta. Smart: Analyzing the Reuse Potential of Legacy Components in A Service-oriented Architecture Environment, Technical Report, SEI, volume CMU/SEI-2008-TN-008, 2008.

A. Umar, Z. Adalberto. Reengineering for service oriented architectures: A strategic decision model for integration versus migration. Journal of Systems and Software , vol. 82, no. 3, pp. 448–462, 2009.

Z. P. Zhang, R. M. Liu, H. J. Yang. Service identification and packaging in service oriented reengineering. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE 2005 , Taipei, Taiwan, China, vol. 5, pp. 620–625, 2005.

J. Oldevik, G. K. Olsen, U. Brönner, N. R. Bodsberg. Model-driven migration of scientific legacy systems to service-oriented architectures. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Model-driven Software Migration , pp. 4–7, 2011.

S. Chung, J. B. C. An, S. Davalos. Service-oriented software reengineering: SoSR. In Proceedings of the 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences , IEEE, Waikoloa, HI, USA, pp. 172c, 2007.

A. Winter, J. Ziemann. Model-based migration to service-oriented architectures. In Proceedings of the 11th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering (CSMR 2007) , Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, pp.107–110, 2007.

M. Razavian, P. Lago. Understanding SOA migration using a conceptual framework. Journal of Systems Integration , vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 33–34, 2010.

S. Frey, W. Hasselbring. Model-based migration of legacy software systems to scalable and resource-efficient cloud-based applications: The cloudMIG approach. In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Cloud Computing, GRIDs, and Virtualization , pp. 155–158, 2010.

PIM4Cloud, [Online], Available: http://www.remics.eu/publicdeliverables , July 10, 2013.

Remics Migrate Toolkit, Preliminary Release, [Online], Available: http://www.remics.eu/publicdeliverables , July 11, 2013.

Remics Migrate Toolkt, interim release, [Online], Available: http://www.remics.eu/publicdeliverables , July 12, 2013.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

College of Computer Science, Inner Mongolia University, Hohhot, 010021, China

Jun-Feng Zhao & Jian-Tao Zhou

You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jian-Tao Zhou .

Additional information

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61262082), Key Project of Chinese Ministry of Education (No. 212025), Inner Mongolia Science Foundation for Distinguished Young Scholars (No. 2012JQ03), Inner Mongolia Natural Science Foundation of Inner Mongolia (No. 2011MS0911), Postgraduate Scientific Research Innovation Project of Inner Mongolia (No. 1402020201013).

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Zhao, JF., Zhou, JT. Strategies and Methods for Cloud Migration. Int. J. Autom. Comput. 11 , 143–152 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11633-014-0776-7

Download citation

Received : 31 July 2013

Revised : 30 December 2013

Published : 12 March 2015

Issue Date : April 2014

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11633-014-0776-7

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

legacy system
infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
platform as a service (PaaS)
software as a service (SaaS)
Find a journal
Publish with us
Track your research

An Effective Approach to Cloud Migration for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs)

Ieee account.

Change Username/Password
Update Address

Purchase Details

Payment Options
Order History
View Purchased Documents

Profile Information

Communications Preferences
Profession and Education
Technical Interests
US & Canada: +1 800 678 4333
Worldwide: +1 732 981 0060
Contact & Support
About IEEE Xplore
Accessibility
Terms of Use
Nondiscrimination Policy
Privacy & Opting Out of Cookies

A not-for-profit organization, IEEE is the world's largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. © Copyright 2024 IEEE - All rights reserved. Use of this web site signifies your agreement to the terms and conditions.

Open access
Published: 25 April 2015

Exploring the factors influencing the cloud computing adoption: a systematic study on cloud migration

Rashmi Rai 1 ,
Gadadhar Sahoo 1 &
Shabana Mehfuz 2

SpringerPlus volume 4 , Article number: 197 ( 2015 ) Cite this article

13k Accesses

Metrics details

Today, most of the organizations trust on their age old legacy applications, to support their business-critical systems. However, there are several critical concerns, as maintainability and scalability issues, associated with the legacy system. In this background, cloud services offer a more agile and cost effective platform, to support business applications and IT infrastructure. As the adoption of cloud services has been increasing recently and so has been the academic research in cloud migration. However, there is a genuine need of secondary study to further strengthen this research. The primary objective of this paper is to scientifically and systematically identify, categorize and compare the existing research work in the area of legacy to cloud migration. The paper has also endeavored to consolidate the research on Security issues, which is prime factor hindering the adoption of cloud through classifying the studies on secure cloud migration. SLR (Systematic Literature Review) of thirty selected papers, published from 2009 to 2014 was conducted to properly understand the nuances of the security framework. To categorize the selected studies, authors have proposed a conceptual model for cloud migration which has resulted in a resource base of existing solutions for cloud migration. This study concludes that cloud migration research is in seminal stage but simultaneously it is also evolving and maturing, with increasing participation from academics and industry alike. The paper also identifies the need for a secure migration model, which can fortify organization’s trust into cloud migration and facilitate necessary tool support to automate the migration process.

1 Introduction

Cloud computing has created a strong buzz around, both in academia and in the industry. Many SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) and IT companies view this technology as an opportunity for considerable business growth thereby creating competitive advantage (Buyya et al. 2009 ; Andrikopoulos et al. 2013 ). For SMEs, the central attraction for adopting cloud technology is its pay-per-use model, which delivers flexible costing options, apart from the scalability and interoperability features, which cloud environments offer. Larger enterprises are attempting to leverage this technology by considering the business continuity strategies for their exponential growth (Buyya et al. 2009 ; Khajeh-Hosseini et al. 2012 ). The traditional legacy system, which supports the core IT processes at organizations, is fraught with maintainability and scalability issues, (Khadka et al. 2013 ). Given the multiple benefits of cloud computing, many organizations are keen to adapt to this innovative technology. However, tackling security issues regarding the cloud and the migration process has hampered the cloud adoption rate (Rosado et al. 2012 ; Mather et al. 2009 ).

This paper is directed towards finding a viable solution to facilitate secure migration of on-premises software application to the cloud environments. Given the inherent advantages of cloud computing and the desire to migrate to cloud, there has been noteworthy research in the area of cloud migration (Khadka et al. 2013 ; Andrikopoulos et al. 2013 ). Most of the approaches have proposed frameworks, techniques, processes and methods which help in the migration and assist in decision process for migrating to cloud. For most of these approaches, the software application is in nascent stage as they are hosted on a local server, before the migration.

During the limited study, it was found that a systematic literature review of research on secure cloud migration hasn’t been undertaken. Besides considering the growing demand for migration toward cloud, there is an equal need to investigate a research framework for secure cloud migration.

A SLR identifies, classifies, and synthesizes a comparative overview of the ongoing research and enables knowledge transfer within the research community (Brereton et al. 2007 ). Likewise, for this paper, a SLR was conducted, with the primary objective to identify, taxonomically classify, and systematically compare the existing research, focused on planning, executing, and validating migration of legacy systems toward cloud-based software. More specifically, to the paper endeavors to answer the following questions, through conducting a methodological review of existing research:

What are the motivations behind migration to the cloud?

What are the existing tasks, methods, and techniques to support secure migration of legacy on-premises software to cloud? In addition, what all tool support is available to achieve the objectives?

What are the existing research themes? What should form future research dimensions in legacy to- cloud migration?

The objective is to systematically identify and taxonomically classify available evidence on secure cloud migration and provide a holistic comparison to analyze potential and limitations of the existing research work.

The remaining sections of this paper are structured as follows: Section 2 describes background and related research to position the contributions of this work. Section 3 explains the research methodology, research questions, and scope; Section 4 provides a reference model for state-of-the research and a characterization scheme for cloud migration; Section 5 presents the results of the systematic review; Section 6 discusses the main findings, implications, and trends followed by an analysis of its limitations in Section 7 and Section 8 concludes the paper.

2 Related work

The research on cloud migration is incomplete without talking about SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture. As both cloud migration and SOA exhibit numerous similarities as well as differences at the same time, it would not be appropriate to position the study on cloud migration without SOA migration. Recently, several studies have focused on migration to SOA, but not many are found for cloud migration. Both these technologies offer key benefits as reduced overall cost, business agility and easy provisioning of services to the organizations. Systematic review of 121 primary studies on SOA migration done by Khadka et al (Khadka et al. 2013 ) showed the use of software re-engineering reference framework for SOA migration, to give a significant view of legacy to SOA migration. This work is motivated by the research methodology used in the mentioned review work. The research agenda developed by the SEI (Software Engineering Institute) for SOA migration (Lewis et al. 2010 ) provides a taxonomy, which is used to classify topics into various aspects of SOA, along with cross-cutting concerns. Another survey done by Razavian & Lago ( 2011 ) with industry representatives as participants on SOA migration highlights the potential gap between the theory and practice of the SOA migration. The survey also identified future research directions in SOA migration. Work done by Pahl et al. ( 2013 ) is based on the three different case studies in industry, which proposed a common migration process, based on expert interviews. They identified a process framework for the three deployment models in cloud computing; however the work didn’t deliberate on post migration activities.

3 Research methodology

This research effort will thus aim to address the following Research Questions (Table 1 ):

Methodology

Systematic Literature Review (SLR) and the related guidelines (Kitchenham 2004 ) have been used, to answer the stated research questions. Select survey with optimal mix of participants and interactive conversation has been used to arrive at answers to some of the questions. Primary objective of systematic literature review is to provide a comprehensive summery of literature related to a research question. “ A systematic literature review is a means of identifying, evaluating and interpreting all available research relevant to a particular research question, or topic area, or phenomena of interest” (Kitchenham 2004 ) . This kind of review involves several discrete activities. Refer to Figure 1 for the Systematic Review Process. They have been divided into three main phases, as follows:

Planning the review

Conducting review

Reporting review

Systematic Review Process.

Stages involved in planning review

The following Table 2 shows the stages involved in planning the review work and the criteria chosen for the review planning.

Development of review protocol

After identifying the need of research, research questions were prepared and the review protocol was designed. Review protocol defines specific procedures for conducting the systematic review process. This procedure helps in gathering fair and unbiased information. This protocol development has different stages, such as search strategy, selection criteria, quality assessment criteria, data extraction form and data synthesis strategy.

Search strategy

This strategy helps in answering key research questions effectively. By using keywords search strings were developed. Search strings are constructed by identifying synonyms and alternative spellings for each of the question elements and link them by using the Boolean OR and Boolean AND. Keywords in Table 3 are defined by using PICO (Population Intervention Comparison Outcomes) method (Kitchenham 2004 ); and are used to construct search strings. The elements of PICO is indicated below-

Population : The population might be any of the specific role, application and area.

Population- Cloud Computing

Intervention : The intervention is the tool or technology or procedure that addresses a specific issue.

Intervention-Cloud Migration

Comparison : This is a tool or technology or procedure with which intervention is being compared.

Comparison- Legacy on premises application

Outcomes : Outcomes should relate to factors of importance to practitioners such as improved security, reliability and cost benefits. All outcomes should be specified.

Outcomes - Secure framework for migration, improved security aspects, performance, cost benefits, applications, tools and techniques.

Search string

Following search strings in Table 4 are appropriately designed by using keywords, which are derived from research questions through PICO method. These search strings are constructed by using Boolean ANDs and ORs.

Search strings are used in digital libraries for getting related research content. The articles, journals, conference papers, and workshop papers have been identified from the most authentic digital databases, that are scientifically and technically peer reviewed. Some of the databases are as follows -

ACM Digital Library

Springer Link

Science Direct

IEEE Xplore

Google Scholar

Reports and white papers published by groups and organizations working on cloud computing (e.g. CSA, NIST, ENISA etc.)

Inclusion criteria

The following inclusion criteria (Table 5 ) were used to include the selected papers.

Exclusion criteria

The research articles were excluded that didn’t meet the criteria mentioned as indicated above in Table 5 and the following parameters:

Articles shorter than 6 pages

Editorials and Abstracts

No-peer reviewed studies

Survey on secure migration process

Survey on the secure migration process was done, to identify key concerns related to the secure adoption of cloud by both industry and academia and also to seek their expert opinion on the proposed framework. All the participants had considerable understanding of cloud computing, its multiple offerings, related technologies, and many hands-on expertise to Cloud environment. As part of their work, the participants were part of the team, which migrated different types of applications to Cloud (including Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, S3, Simple DB, Windows Azure etc.). With their exposure to the cloud computing environment, they were reliable and valuable participants for the discussion.

Participants

The discussion and the survey were carried out with 9 participants from industry and academia individually. Refer Table 6 for the survey participants. The sample characteristics are shown in Figure 2 .

Sample Characteristics (Total = 9).

Discussion protocol

Each participant was asked similar questions in three steps:

Firstly, each participant was asked for his opinions on the state of art of cloud computing, existing security concerns and the taxonomy of migration tasks. The participants were encouraged to suggest adding more tasks, removing some, or re-categorizing a task.

Secondly, the framework for secure cloud migration was presented to the participants, and they were asked for their expert opinion and advice on the model.

Thirdly, each participant was asked to describe a cloud migration project, which they worked on, together with the time spent on each migration task in that project.

The discussion was completed with each participant individually, without knowledge of other participants’ answers in the first round. Second round of discussions was conducted with each participant again, but this time with knowledge of other participants’ replies, to decrease the range of answers. This is known as Delphi technique and its helps combine experts’ opinion for a better judgment (Shepperd & Schofield 1997 ). Interactive conversation survey method was used for conducting fair survey. Here in this method, professional websites as m LinkedIn, different blogs related to Cloud and Cloud Migration was leveraged for conducting the survey. Questionnaires were posted into those sites to have an interactive conversation with the participants, regarding cloud. Author also had few conversations with select organizations using live chat who are working in the field of Cloud.

4 A 5-phase model for classification and comparison of cloud migration research

In this section, a conceptual model called as ‘5-Phased Cloud Migration Model’ has been introduced, to classify and categorize cloud migration research, in terms of distinct phases or processes involved in the cloud migration. While developing this reference model, situational method engineering has been adopted to consolidate the existing frameworks (e.g.P3, P4, P9, P23 etc.) in cloud migration. Method engineering follows a bottom-up approach by identifying low level activities and techniques. These low level activities are then categorized to form generalized processes and phases. Alternatively, a top-down approach forms a framework or a conceptual model consisting of phases, processes and activities. Based on these existing frameworks and guidelines, we have identified the key phases in cloud migration. By reviewing the primary studies and exploring the defined migration tasks, migration process has been categorized in five phases. Figure 3 below represents the ‘5-phased cloud migration model’ which is also inspired by the well-known ‘Water Fall model from the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). The proposed conceptual model consists of five phases. Figure 4 shows the distribution of studies according to 5-Phase Cloud Migration Model

5-Phase Cloud Migration Model.

Distribution of studies according to 5-Phase Cloud Migration Model.

Phase-1: Feasibility study [5 studies]

In the first phase the goal is to identify or determine whether the cloud migration is financially/ technically feasible or not [P2] [P6] [P8] [P13] [P14].

Phase-2: Requirement analysis & migration planning [18 Studies]

In this phase, a detailed assessment of the existing IT environment is done. The objective is to understand the applications that are appropriate for moving into the Cloud [P2] [P15] [P16] [P18], decision making regarding which cloud provider to choose [P3] [P5] [P6] [P9] [P13] [P16], which part of the application to be migrated [P3] [P6] [P13] [P15] and which services to use [P4] [P6] [P11] [P12] are conducted. The output of this phase is a detailed migration plan document.

Phase-3: Migration execution [15 Studies]

In the migration execution phase, the actual migration of data and application is carried out. The process like data extraction [P2] [P11] [P22], code modification [P15] [P17] [P20], architecture recovery [P9] [P11] [P2] [P22] [P18] [P20], cloud migration [P9] [P22] [P17] etc. are actually implemented.

Phase-4: Testing & migration validation [6 Studies]

In the fourth phase, testing and evaluation is done to validate the migrated system [P9] [P11] [P15] [P22] [P17] [P18].

Phase-5: Monitoring & maintenance [4 Studies]

The last and fifth phase is required to maintain and monitor the migrated systems. Not much evidence could be found for this activity in the selected study except for some related activities, as governance [P2] and training [P11] [P21] [P17].

In this section we have discussed the results of the SLR process based on the research questions that were defined in Section 1 .

Key factors for migration

Based on the existing literature, the research question (RQ1) has been answered and the key reasons for adoption of clouds have been identified. Some of the key drivers for the adoption of clouds are:

Cost saving

Optimum resource utilization

Unlimited scalability of resources

Less maintainability

These key drivers for cloud adoption have been identified from the selected primary studies and have been presented in a tabular form along with the author’s name and title. For instance the cost saving has been the major driver for cloud adoption as mentioned and discussed about in several studies, also indicated in the Table 7 below.

Challenges in cloud migration process

In our previous work (Rashmi et al. 2013 ) we have identified (refer Table 8 ) various challenges in the cloud migration process and have attempted to answer the RQ2 by listing out various challenges which organizations face, while adopting the cloud.

Existing processes or frameworks for secure cloud migration

To answer RQ3, classification of different migration types given in (Khajeh-Hosseini et al. 2012 ) has been referred to. This work considers different application layers and different degree of adaptation required to enable migration. It classifies the migration process into following types:

This type of migration replaces one or more legacy component with cloud services. This is least invasive of all types and requires data or business tiers to be migrated to the cloud stack. This type of migration is done by reconfiguring the components and is done to adjust incompatibilities, to use functionalities of the migrating layer. Replace type of migration couldn’t be identified in the selected studies. This particular type is not very popular as much as pure cloud enabler and hence the evidence in probably not available.

Partially Migrate

This one partially migrates some of the systems components to the cloud. There are quite few papers on the partial migration where the organizations have migrated one or more application layer implementing a particular functionality in the cloud.

Migrate the whole application

This is a perfect example of migration where the whole application is encapsulated in one or more virtual machines, which are already running into the clouds. This one also doesn’t need many changes to the application, assuming the application can be ported ‘as is’ into a virtual machine.

Cloudify is an example of full migration, where an application is converted to a fully-fledged cloud enabled system by composing cloud services.

Table 9 below categorizes all the four types of migration along with the Cloud Deployment models, which were used in the migration process. The table also identifies various tools/frameworks which are used in the selected studies.

Current state and ongoing research issues in secure cloud migration

In this section, we have attempted to answer RQ 4 by carrying out a systematic review of the existing approaches for legacy to cloud migration. This review is done to summarize the existing approaches, models, tools and techniques and also to identify and analyze the security issues considered in these migration approaches. The focal objective is to identify the possible solutions offered to address the security concerns or needs in the cloud migration process. In this regard, a set of approaches have been collated which is pertinent for this analysis. The details are as summarized in the Table 10 .

The central objective of this review paper was to consolidate the existing research on cloud migration and identify the security concerns reflected in these selected review papers. The foremost contribution of this systematic review is the proposition of conceptual model for cloud migration for the characterization of the studies and a comparative analysis of the existing literature through the model, to indicate the tools and techniques used in the various studies. Authors have also tried to identify the security concerns in the existing literature studies on cloud migration. Authors have defined the cloud migration process in a 5-Phased model. The five phases are as follows-

Feasibility study

Requirement analysis & migration planning

Migration execution

Testing & migration validation

Monitoring & maintenance

After analyzing the studies collected through this Systematic Review Process, a number of research challenges were observed and which indicated future directions of this research.

Growing maturity of cloud migration – Even though it has been acknowledged that the maturity of the cloud migration is in its pivotal stage, one can observe a clear sign of growth by observing various types of cloud migration being reported in the literature (already discussed in Section 2.3). Proper validation across all these types of migration is an area that needs immediate attention by the cloud researchers.

Need for more results on cloud migration evaluation - By observing the results on cloud migration in the selected studies one can clearly identify the need for more and more results and real-time case studies from industries on cloud migration. More evaluation, survey and experience reports on legacy-to-cloud migration will be needed, which will result in more trust and confidence of researchers regarding the validity of cloud migration research.

Need of a comprehensive migration framework – Although, the Authors have presented a 5-Phase model for cloud migration in Section 4 , the cloud researchers needs to propose a more comprehensive framework such as the ones proposed for SOA migration (Discussed in Section 2 ) with tangible evidence of solutions in terms of methods and techniques.

Solutions to address Security Concerns – As per the distribution of studies based on the 5-Phase model for cloud migration (Figure 4 ), the main focus of the research is on the requirement analysis and cloud migration planning (approx. 38%), however very few of them address the security concerns hovering over the cloud migration (discussed in Section 5.4 ).

To summarize, one can conclude that cloud migration is still in its nascent stage, but is maturing at a fast pace. The Authors have acknowledged the call for a tangible secure migration framework, to facilitate systematic and trustworthy migration to the cloud.

Andrikopoulos V, Binz T, Leymann F, Strauch S (2013) How to adapt applications for the cloud environment: challenges and solutions in migrating applications to the cloud. Computing 95(6):493–535

Article Google Scholar

Babar MA, Chauhan MA (2011) A tale of migration to cloud computing for sharing experiences and observations. In Proceeding of the 2nd international workshop on Software engineering for cloud computing (SECLOUD ’11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 50-56. DOI=10.1145/1985500.1985509

Google Scholar

Beserra PV, Camara A, Ximenes R, Albuquerque AB, Mendonca NC (2012) “Cloudstep: A step-by-step decision process to support legacy application migration to the cloud,” Maintenance and Evolution of Service-Oriented and Cloud-Based Systems (MESOCA). IEEE 6th International Workshop on the, vol., no., pp.7,16, 24–24Sept.2012, Fortaleza, Brazil

Brereton P, Kitchenham BA, Budgen D, Turner M, Khalil M (2007) Lessons from applying the systematic literature review process within the software engineering domain. J Syst and Software 80(4):571–583

Buyya R, Yeo CS, Venugopal S, Broberg J, Brandic I (2009) Cloud computing and emerging IT platforms: vision, hype, and reality for delivering computing as the fifth utility. Futur Gener Comput Syst 25(6):599–616

Chauhan MA, Babar MA (2011) Migrating service-oriented system to cloud computing: an experience report. In: International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD 2011), pp. 404–411. IEEE

Fittkau F, Frey S, Hasselbring W (2012) CDOSim: simulating cloud deployment options for software migration support. In: Proceedings of 6th IEEE International workshop on the maintenance and evolution of service- oriented and cloud-based systems (MESOCA 2012), 24. Sep.12, Riva del Garda, Italy

Frey S, Hasselbring W (2010) Model-based migration of legacy software systems into the cloud: the CLOUDMIG Approach. In: Proceedings of 12th Workshop on Software-Reengineering of the GI-SRE. Bad Honnef, Germany, 3–5 May 2010.

Frey S, Hasselbring W (2011) “An extensible architecture for detecting violations of a cloud environment’s constraints during legacy software system migration,” Software maintenance and reengineering (CSMR), 2011 15th European Conference on, vol., no., pp.269,278, 1–4 March 2011. doi:10.1109/CSMR.2011.33

Frey S, Fittkau F, Hasselbring W (2013a) Search-based genetic optimization for deployment and reconfiguration of software in the cloud. International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE-13). San Francisco, CA, USA,18–26 May 2013

Frey S, Hasselbring W, Schnoor B (2013b) Automatic conformance checking for migrating software systems to cloud infrastructures and platforms. J Softw Evol Proc 25:1089–1115, doi:10.1002/smr.582

Hajjat, M., Sun, X., Sung, Y., Maltz, D., Rao, S., Sripanidkulchai, K., Tawarmalani, M.: Cloudward bound: planning for beneficial migration of enterprise applications to the cloud. In: ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, vol. 40, pp. 243–254. ACM (2010)

Hu J, Klein A (2009) A benchmark of transparent data encryption for migration of web applications in the cloud. In: Proceedings of 2009 Eighth IEEE International Conference on dependable, autonomic and secure computing. Chengdu, China, 12–14 December 2009; pp. 735–740.

Kaisler S, Money WH (2011) Service Migration in a Cloud Architecture. In: Proceedings of 44th Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science (HICSS-44 2011), Kauai, HI, USA, 4–7 January 2011. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, pp pp. 1–pp. 10

Chapter Google Scholar

Kalloniatis C, Manousakis V, Mouratidis H, Gritzalis S (2013) “Migrating into the Cloud: Identifying the Major Security and Privacy Concerns”. In: Douligeris C, Polemi N (eds) I3E 2013 12th IFIP Conference on e-Business, e-Services, e-Society. Springer, Piraeus, Greece

Khadka, Ravi, Amir Saeidi, Andrei Idu, Jurriaan Hage and Slinger Jansen. “Legacy to SOA Evolution: A Systematic Literature Review.” Migrating Legacy Applications: Challenges in Service Oriented Architecture and Cloud Computing Environments. IGI Global, 2013. 40-70. Web. 15 Apr. 2015. doi:10.4018/978-1-4666-2488-7.ch003

Khajeh-Hosseini A, Greenwood D, Sommerville I (2010) Cloud migration: a case study of migrating an enterprise IT system to IaaS. In: Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE international conference on cloud computing. pp 450–457

Khajeh-Hosseini A, Greenwood D, Sommerville I (2010) Cloud migration: a case study of migrating an enterprise IT system to IaaS. In: Proceedings of 2010 IEEE 3rd International Conference on cloud computing. Miami, FL, USA, 3–10 July 2010.

Khajeh-Hosseini A, Sommerville I, Bogaerts J, Teregowda P (2011) Decision support tools for cloud migration in the enterprise. In: Proceedings of 2011 IEEE 4th International Conference on cloud computing. Washinton, DC, USA, 4–9 July 2011

Khajeh-Hosseini A, Greenwood D, Smith JW, Sommerville I (2012) The cloud adoption toolkit: supporting cloud adoption decisions in the enterprise. Software - Practice Exp 42:447–465

Kitchenham B (2004) Procedures for performing systematic reviews. Keele University, 332004, Keele, UK

Lewis GA, Smith DB, and Kontogiannis K (2010) “A Research Agenda for Service-Oriented Architecture(SOA):Maintenance and Evolution of Service-Oriented Systems,” technical report,Software Eng.Inst.

Lloyd W, Pallickara S, Olaf D, Jim L, Mazdak A, Ken R (2011) Migration of multi-tier applications to infrastructure-as-a-service clouds: an investigation using kernel-based virtual machines, Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE/ACM 12th International Conference on Grid Computing, p.137–144, September 21–23, 2011. doi:10.1109/Grid.2011.26

Mather T, Kumaraswamy S, Latif S (2009) Cloud security and privacy. O’Reilly Media, Inc., Sebastopol, CA

Menzel M, Ranjan R (2012) CloudGenius: decision support for web server cloud migration, In: Proceedings of WWW 2012, April 16–20, 2012. Lyon, France

Mohagheghi P, Saether T (2011) Software Engineering Challenges for Migration to the Service Cloud Paradigm Ongoing Work in the REMICS Project. IEEE World Congress on Services

Pahl C, Xiong H, Walshe R (2013) “A comparison of On-Premise to Cloud Migration Approaches- A Tale of Four Cloud Migration Processes”. Proc. European Conf. Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing

Parastoo M, Jørgen BA, Sadovykh A, Barbier F, Benguria G (2010) Reuse and Migration of Legacy Systems to Interoperable Cloud Services-The REMICS Project. In Proceedings of 4th Workshop on Modeling, Design, and Analysis for the Service Cloud (MDA4ServiceCloud2010), Paris, France.

Rashmi R, Shabana M, Sahoo G (2013) “Efficient migration of application to clouds: analysis and comparison”. GSTF J Comput (3) (ISSN: 2010-2283) doi:10.5176/2251-3043_3.3.272.

Razavian M, Lago P (2011) “A Survey of SOA Migration in Industry”. Proc. Ninth Int’l Conf. Service-Oriented Computing, pp.618–626

Rosado DG, Gómez R, Mellado D, Fernández Medina E (2012) Security analysis in the migration to cloud environments. Future Internet 4(2):469–487, 10

Shepperd M, Schofield C (1997) Estimating software project effort using analogies. IEEE Trans Softw Eng 23:736–743, 33, 51, 53

Tak BC, Bhuvan U, Anand S (2011) “To Move or Not to Move: The Economics of Cloud Computing”, Third USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HOTCLOUD 2011). Portland, Oregon

Tran V, Keung J, Liu A, Fekete A (2011) “Application migration to cloud: a taxonomy of critical factors”. Proc. Second Int’l Workshop Software Eng. for Cloud Computing

Tran V, Keung JW, Liu A, Fekete A (2011b) “Size estimation of cloud migration projects with cloud migration point (CMP)” International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM 2011). Banff, Alberta, Canada

Vu QH, Asal R (2012) “Legacy application migration to the cloud: practicability and methodology”, SERVICES, 2012 IEEE Eighth World Congress on Services, pp. 270–277. doi:10.1109/SERVICES.2012.47

Ward C, Aravamudan N, Bhattacharya K, Cheng K, Filepp R, Kearney R, Peterson B, Shwartz L, Young C (2010) Workload migration into clouds - challenges, experiences, opportunities. IEEE CLOUD 2010, Florida, USA, pp 164–171

Yam CY, Baldwin A, Shiu S, Ioannidis C (2011) “Migration to cloud as real option: investment decision under uncertainty,” trust, security and privacy in computing and communications (TrustCom), 2011 IEEE 10th International Conference on, vol., no., pp.940,949, 16–18 Nov. 2011.doi:10.1109/TrustCom.2011.130

Yu D, Jian W, Bo H, Jianxiao L, Xiuwei Z, Keqing H, Liang-Jie Z (2011) “A practical architecture of cloudification of legacy applications,” services (SERVICES), 2011 IEEE World Congress on, vol., no., pp.17,24, 4–9 July 2011. doi:10.1109/SERVICES.2011.84

Zardari S, Bahsoon R (2011) Cloud Adoption: a goal-oriented requirements engineering Approach. In: the Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Workshop on Cloud Software Engineering, the ACM/IEEE 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). Hawaii, USA.

Zhang W, Berre AJ, Roman D, Huru HA (2009). Migrating legacy applications to the service Cloud. In: 14th conference companion on object oriented programming systems languages and applications (OOPSLA 2009). Orlando, Florida, USA, 25–29 October 2009; pp. 59–68.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, Ranchi, India

Rashmi Rai & Gadadhar Sahoo

Department of Electrical Engineering, Jamia Milia Islamia, Delhi, India

Shabana Mehfuz

You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rashmi Rai .

Additional information

Competing interests.

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Authors’ contributions

RR has carried out the survey of the available literature on cloud migration and drafted the manuscript. GS has critically reviewed the paper and drafted the manuscript especially the conceptual framework of cloud migration model. SM has conceptually reviewed the paper specially the related work section. All the authors have read and approved the final manuscript.

Authors’ information

Rashmi Rai is a PhD researcher at Birla Institute of Technology. She holds B.E. (I.T.) and M.Tech.(C.S.) degree and her current research focus is on Cloud Migration and securing Cloud environments. She can be contacted at: [email protected].

Dr. G.Sahoo has been associated with Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, Ranchi, India since 1988, and currently, he is working as a Professor and Dean Admissions. His research interest includes Theoretical Computer Science, Parallel and Distributed Computing, Cloud Computing, Evolutionary Computing, Information Security, Image Processing and Pattern Recognition. Contact: [email protected].

Dr. Shabana Mehfuz is currently working as Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Jamia Milia Islamia, New Delhi, India. Her research interest includes Computational Intelligence and Computer Networks. Contact: [email protected].

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 ), which permits use, duplication, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

Rai, R., Sahoo, G. & Mehfuz, S. Exploring the factors influencing the cloud computing adoption: a systematic study on cloud migration. SpringerPlus 4 , 197 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40064-015-0962-2

Download citation

Received : 13 October 2014

Accepted : 01 April 2015

Published : 25 April 2015

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s40064-015-0962-2

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

Cloud migration
Secure migration
Legacy-to-cloud migration
Systematic literature review

cloud migration Recently Published Documents

Total documents.

Latest Documents
Most Cited Documents
Contributed Authors
Related Sources
Related Keywords

The Impact of Cloud Computing on the IT Support Function

The development of digital technologies has opened up new opportunities for e-learning in higher education. These technologies include cloud computing, which promises a scalable and reliable computing environment for both staff and students. This has not only changed the teaching, learning, and research environment, but also affected the way IT support services must now operate in the university sector. This chapter investigates the adoption of cloud computing in higher education through a case study of a major UK university and focuses on how this has affected the IT support function. The benefits and challenges of implementing cloud computing are explored, using questionnaires and interviews to generate data and analysis. The chapter concludes that cloud migration is a complex undertaking requiring a robust strategy that pays due attention to a wide range of issues, notably security concerns and the need for reskilling and the development of new support roles.

1.6 AUTH | Risiko Cloud-Migration: Wie man Zugriffe auf Cloud-Ressourcen absichert und überwacht

Exploring live cloud migration on amazon s3 instance using intercloudframework, 10 expert tips for a successful cloud migration, challenges for public sector organisations in cloud adoption: a case study of south australian public sector agency.

This research explores critical aspects of procurement of ICT cloud services for South Australian public sector organisations with the case of South Australia Police (SAPOL) for evaluation. SAPOL as one of the state government agencies at the time is initiating this transition to the cloud environment. This exploratory research takes place when this public sector agency is doing its due diligence to ensure a successful implementation. In this study the researcher started off with surfacing the challenges in this journey for a public sector organisation before the actual journey commenced. SAPOL being a public sector organisation operates differently from private enterprises and has certain constraints and limitations that pose additional challenges for the organisation to transition towards the cloud. Interview with the CIO of the organisation responsible for the cloud migration initiative was organised. After detailed literature review, an interview questionnaire was prepared in accordance with the subject of interest. The information gathered in the interviews was recorded for detailed analysis. This paper contains a detailed report on the information analysed highlighting fourteen important challenges faced by the organisation in this cloud migration journey.

A Literature Review on the Readiness for Providing Cloud Services Locally in Yemen

Over time, the importance of information and the need to use it are increased. Cloud computing provides data and computing resources to clients as a service. However, cloud computing provides to the end user computing recourses such as software, hardware, and information as a service through the available interface over the Internet to be with more advantages to make the information available and accessible whenever is needed, by using the cloud computing services offers these services. The main purpose of this literature review paper is to develop an understanding of cloud computing adoption. Moreover, this paper forms the basis of our theoretical study. In particular, we review the state of the art of cloud computing and discuss about it aspects and features. In addition, we provide a set of cloud readiness criteria and review cloud migration in some countries that have already shifted to cloud. In this paper, we investigate the readiness to provide cloud services locally, as well as the chances and challenges of combining cloud services with existing infrastructure. Furthermore, the telecom sector infrastructure is suitable to provide cloud services, as the first step to provide the cloud into the network infrastructure of such providers, enabling and enhancing the telecom sector services and infrastructure.

Migration Issues in Cloud Computing

Abstract: Cloud computing rules in the new digital transformation world and gets wide acceptance in the field of business. The cloud can solve many problems like scalability of the business, flexibility of the business, cost and performance that may come across while running an enterprise. In fact, by digital transformation, fixed costs may get reduced, a more flexible allocation of resources is possible, faster development of the enterprise is resulted, worldwide reach is through the cloud highly appreciable, a safer change control process, and faster time-to-market with objectively better products. Even though it promises many benefits, it is not an easy task to migrate to cloud platform from a current conventional business platform. Cloud migration introduces its own issues. While looking for migrating business from on-premises to cloud, many challenges should be kept in mind for successful migration. Keywords: Cloud migration, digital transformation

A Conceptual Framework for Secure Cloud Migration

Impact of cloud computing on business.

Cloud computing is very helpful for a business just because cloud computing helps the small and large business to start a digital business. Due to the rapid growth of computing resources over the past years, cloud computing has been treated as a prominent research field and this technology appeared as a new solution in the IT field. Many businesses including small, medium, and enterprise are migrating to this technology for so many reasons such as availability of computing resources, reduced total cost of ownership, on- demand services, increased revenue, and many more. Cloud Computing offers a number of advantages of cloud migration that motivated business enterprises to adopt this change. Our Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi Ji dreams to make a digital India and the cloud could help to make India digital.

The Structural Modeling of Significant Factors for Sustainable Cloud Migration

Export citation format, share document.

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Publications
Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

Advanced Search
Journal List
Springerplus

Exploring the factors influencing the cloud computing adoption: a systematic study on cloud migration

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, Ranchi, India

Gadadhar Sahoo

Shabana mehfuz.

Department of Electrical Engineering, Jamia Milia Islamia, Delhi, India

1 Introduction

i. What are the motivations behind migration to the cloud?
ii. What are the existing tasks, methods, and techniques to support secure migration of legacy on-premises software to cloud? In addition, what all tool support is available to achieve the objectives?
iii. What are the existing research themes? What should form future research dimensions in legacy to- cloud migration?

2 Related work

3 Research methodology

This research effort will thus aim to address the following Research Questions (Table 1 ):

Research questions and their motivation

Methodology

i. Planning the review
ii. Conducting review
iii. Reporting review

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is 40064_2015_962_Fig1_HTML.jpg

Systematic Review Process.

Planning the review

Stages involved in planning review.

The following Table 2 shows the stages involved in planning the review work and the criteria chosen for the review planning.

Stages and their criteria involved in planning the review

Development of review protocol

Search strategy

Population- Cloud Computing
Intervention-Cloud Migration
Comparison- Legacy on premises application
Outcomes - Secure framework for migration, improved security aspects, performance, cost benefits, applications, tools and techniques.

Research questions and keywords

Search string

Research questions and search strings

i. ACM Digital Library
ii. Springer Link
iii. Science Direct
iv. IEEE Xplore
v. Google Scholar
vii. Compendex
viii. Reports and white papers published by groups and organizations working on cloud computing (e.g. CSA, NIST, ENISA etc.)

Inclusion criteria

The following inclusion criteria (Table 5 ) were used to include the selected papers.

Exclusion criteria

The research articles were excluded that didn’t meet the criteria mentioned as indicated above in Table 5 and the following parameters:

i. Articles shorter than 6 pages
ii. Editorials and Abstracts
iii. No-peer reviewed studies

Survey on secure migration process

Participants

Survey participants

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is 40064_2015_962_Fig2_HTML.jpg

Sample Characteristics (Total = 9).

Discussion protocol

Each participant was asked similar questions in three steps:

i. Firstly, each participant was asked for his opinions on the state of art of cloud computing, existing security concerns and the taxonomy of migration tasks. The participants were encouraged to suggest adding more tasks, removing some, or re-categorizing a task.
ii. Secondly, the framework for secure cloud migration was presented to the participants, and they were asked for their expert opinion and advice on the model.
iii. Thirdly, each participant was asked to describe a cloud migration project, which they worked on, together with the time spent on each migration task in that project.

4 A 5-phase model for classification and comparison of cloud migration research

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is 40064_2015_962_Fig3_HTML.jpg

5-Phase Cloud Migration Model.

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is 40064_2015_962_Fig4_HTML.jpg

Distribution of studies according to 5-Phase Cloud Migration Model.

Phase-1: Feasibility study [5 studies]

In the first phase the goal is to identify or determine whether the cloud migration is financially/ technically feasible or not [P2] [P6] [P8] [P13] [P14].

Phase-2: Requirement analysis & migration planning [18 Studies]

Phase-3: Migration execution [15 Studies]

Phase-4: Testing & migration validation [6 Studies]

In the fourth phase, testing and evaluation is done to validate the migrated system [P9] [P11] [P15] [P22] [P17] [P18].

Phase-5: Monitoring & maintenance [4 Studies]

In this section we have discussed the results of the SLR process based on the research questions that were defined in Section 1 .

Key factors for migration

i. Cost saving
ii. Optimum resource utilization
iii. Unlimited scalability of resources
iv. Less maintainability

Challenges in cloud migration process

Migration challenges

Existing processes or frameworks for secure cloud migration

Cloudify is an example of full migration, where an application is converted to a fully-fledged cloud enabled system by composing cloud services.

Categorization of primary studies based on migration type, deployment model and tool support

Current state and ongoing research issues in secure cloud migration

Primary studies on secure cloud migration and key findings

i. Feasibility study
ii. Requirement analysis & migration planning
iii. Migration execution
iv. Testing & migration validation
v. Monitoring & maintenance

After analyzing the studies collected through this Systematic Review Process, a number of research challenges were observed and which indicated future directions of this research.

i. Growing maturity of cloud migration – Even though it has been acknowledged that the maturity of the cloud migration is in its pivotal stage, one can observe a clear sign of growth by observing various types of cloud migration being reported in the literature (already discussed in Section 2.3). Proper validation across all these types of migration is an area that needs immediate attention by the cloud researchers.
ii. Need for more results on cloud migration evaluation - By observing the results on cloud migration in the selected studies one can clearly identify the need for more and more results and real-time case studies from industries on cloud migration. More evaluation, survey and experience reports on legacy-to-cloud migration will be needed, which will result in more trust and confidence of researchers regarding the validity of cloud migration research.
iii. Need of a comprehensive migration framework – Although, the Authors have presented a 5-Phase model for cloud migration in Section 4 , the cloud researchers needs to propose a more comprehensive framework such as the ones proposed for SOA migration (Discussed in Section 2 ) with tangible evidence of solutions in terms of methods and techniques.
iv. Solutions to address Security Concerns – As per the distribution of studies based on the 5-Phase model for cloud migration (Figure 4 ), the main focus of the research is on the requirement analysis and cloud migration planning (approx. 38%), however very few of them address the security concerns hovering over the cloud migration (discussed in Section 5.4 ).

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Authors’ contributions

Authors’ information

Contributor Information

Rashmi Rai, Email: moc.liamg@iarrimhsar .

Gadadhar Sahoo, Email: ni.ca.arsemtib@oohasg .

Shabana Mehfuz, Email: moc.oohay@zufhem_anabahs .

Andrikopoulos V, Binz T, Leymann F, Strauch S. How to adapt applications for the cloud environment: challenges and solutions in migrating applications to the cloud. Computing. 2013; 95 (6):493–535. doi: 10.1007/s00607-012-0248-2. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Babar MA, Chauhan MA. A tale of migration to cloud computing for sharing experiences and observations. In Proceeding of the 2nd international workshop on Software engineering for cloud computing (SECLOUD ’11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 50-56. DOI=10.1145/1985500.1985509. 2011. [ Google Scholar ]
Beserra PV, Camara A, Ximenes R, Albuquerque AB, Mendonca NC. “Cloudstep: A step-by-step decision process to support legacy application migration to the cloud,” Maintenance and Evolution of Service-Oriented and Cloud-Based Systems (MESOCA) Fortaleza, Brazil: IEEE 6th International Workshop on the, vol., no., pp.7,16, 24–24Sept.2012; 2012. [ Google Scholar ]
Brereton P, Kitchenham BA, Budgen D, Turner M, Khalil M. Lessons from applying the systematic literature review process within the software engineering domain. J Syst and Software. 2007; 80 (4):571–583. doi: 10.1016/j.jss.2006.07.009. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Buyya R, Yeo CS, Venugopal S, Broberg J, Brandic I. Cloud computing and emerging IT platforms: vision, hype, and reality for delivering computing as the fifth utility. Futur Gener Comput Syst. 2009; 25 (6):599–616. doi: 10.1016/j.future.2008.12.001. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Chauhan MA, Babar MA (2011) Migrating service-oriented system to cloud computing: an experience report. In: International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD 2011), pp. 404–411. IEEE
Fittkau F, Frey S, Hasselbring W. Proceedings of 6th IEEE International workshop on the maintenance and evolution of service- oriented and cloud-based systems (MESOCA 2012), 24. Sep.12, Riva del Garda, Italy. 2012. CDOSim: simulating cloud deployment options for software migration support. [ Google Scholar ]
Frey S, Hasselbring W (2010) Model-based migration of legacy software systems into the cloud: the CLOUDMIG Approach. In: Proceedings of 12th Workshop on Software-Reengineering of the GI-SRE. Bad Honnef, Germany, 3–5 May 2010.
Frey S, Hasselbring W (2011) “An extensible architecture for detecting violations of a cloud environment’s constraints during legacy software system migration,” Software maintenance and reengineering (CSMR), 2011 15th European Conference on, vol., no., pp.269,278, 1–4 March 2011. doi:10.1109/CSMR.2011.33
Frey S, Fittkau F, Hasselbring W. Search-based genetic optimization for deployment and reconfiguration of software in the cloud. International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE-13). San Francisco, CA, USA,18–26 May 2013. 2013. [ Google Scholar ]
Frey S, Hasselbring W, Schnoor B. Automatic conformance checking for migrating software systems to cloud infrastructures and platforms. J Softw Evol Proc. 2013; 25 :1089–1115. doi: 10.1002/smr.582. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Hajjat, M., Sun, X., Sung, Y., Maltz, D., Rao, S., Sripanidkulchai, K., Tawarmalani, M.: Cloudward bound: planning for beneficial migration of enterprise applications to the cloud. In: ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, vol. 40, pp. 243–254. ACM (2010)
Hu J, Klein A (2009) A benchmark of transparent data encryption for migration of web applications in the cloud. In: Proceedings of 2009 Eighth IEEE International Conference on dependable, autonomic and secure computing. Chengdu, China, 12–14 December 2009; pp. 735–740.
Kaisler S, Money WH. Proceedings of 44th Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science (HICSS-44 2011), Kauai, HI, USA, 4–7 January 2011. Washington, DC, USA: IEEE Computer Society; 2011. Service Migration in a Cloud Architecture; pp. pp. 1–pp. 10. [ Google Scholar ]
Kalloniatis C, Manousakis V, Mouratidis H, Gritzalis S. “Migrating into the Cloud: Identifying the Major Security and Privacy Concerns” In: Douligeris C, Polemi N, editors. I3E 2013 12th IFIP Conference on e-Business, e-Services, e-Society. Piraeus, Greece: Springer; 2013. [ Google Scholar ]
Khadka, Ravi, Amir Saeidi, Andrei Idu, Jurriaan Hage and Slinger Jansen. “Legacy to SOA Evolution: A Systematic Literature Review.” Migrating Legacy Applications: Challenges in Service Oriented Architecture and Cloud Computing Environments. IGI Global, 2013. 40-70. Web. 15 Apr. 2015. doi:10.4018/978-1-4666-2488-7.ch003
Khajeh-Hosseini A, Greenwood D, Sommerville I (2010) Cloud migration: a case study of migrating an enterprise IT system to IaaS. In: Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE international conference on cloud computing. pp 450–457
Khajeh-Hosseini A, Greenwood D, Sommerville I (2010) Cloud migration: a case study of migrating an enterprise IT system to IaaS. In: Proceedings of 2010 IEEE 3rd International Conference on cloud computing. Miami, FL, USA, 3–10 July 2010.
Khajeh-Hosseini A, Sommerville I, Bogaerts J, Teregowda P. Proceedings of 2011 IEEE 4th International Conference on cloud computing. Washinton, DC, USA, 4–9 July 2011. 2011. Decision support tools for cloud migration in the enterprise. [ Google Scholar ]
Khajeh-Hosseini A, Greenwood D, Smith JW, Sommerville I. The cloud adoption toolkit: supporting cloud adoption decisions in the enterprise. Software - Practice Exp. 2012; 42 :447–465. doi: 10.1002/spe.1072. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Kitchenham B. Procedures for performing systematic reviews. Keele, UK: Keele University, 332004; 2004. [ Google Scholar ]
Lewis GA, Smith DB, and Kontogiannis K (2010) “A Research Agenda for Service-Oriented Architecture(SOA):Maintenance and Evolution of Service-Oriented Systems,” technical report,Software Eng.Inst.
Lloyd W, Pallickara S, Olaf D, Jim L, Mazdak A, Ken R. Migration of multi-tier applications to infrastructure-as-a-service clouds: an investigation using kernel-based virtual machines. 2011. [ Google Scholar ]
Mather T, Kumaraswamy S, Latif S. Cloud security and privacy. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, Inc.; 2009. [ Google Scholar ]
Menzel M, Ranjan R (2012) CloudGenius: decision support for web server cloud migration, In: Proceedings of WWW 2012, April 16–20, 2012. Lyon, France
Mohagheghi P, Saether T. Software Engineering Challenges for Migration to the Service Cloud Paradigm Ongoing Work in the REMICS Project. IEEE World Congress on Services. 2011. [ Google Scholar ]
Pahl C, Xiong H, Walshe R (2013) “A comparison of On-Premise to Cloud Migration Approaches- A Tale of Four Cloud Migration Processes”. Proc. European Conf. Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing
Parastoo M, Jørgen BA, Sadovykh A, Barbier F, Benguria G (2010) Reuse and Migration of Legacy Systems to Interoperable Cloud Services-The REMICS Project. In Proceedings of 4th Workshop on Modeling, Design, and Analysis for the Service Cloud (MDA4ServiceCloud2010), Paris, France.
Rashmi R, Shabana M, Sahoo G (2013) “Efficient migration of application to clouds: analysis and comparison”. GSTF J Comput (3) (ISSN: 2010-2283) doi:10.5176/2251-3043_3.3.272.
Razavian M, Lago P (2011) “A Survey of SOA Migration in Industry”. Proc. Ninth Int’l Conf. Service-Oriented Computing, pp.618–626
Rosado DG, Gómez R, Mellado D, Fernández Medina E. Security analysis in the migration to cloud environments. Future Internet. 2012; 4 (2):469–487. doi: 10.3390/fi4020469. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Shepperd M, Schofield C. Estimating software project effort using analogies. IEEE Trans Softw Eng. 1997; 23 :736–743. doi: 10.1109/32.637387. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Tak BC, Bhuvan U, Anand S. “To Move or Not to Move: The Economics of Cloud Computing”, Third USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HOTCLOUD 2011). Portland, Oregon. 2011. [ Google Scholar ]
Tran V, Keung J, Liu A, Fekete A (2011) “Application migration to cloud: a taxonomy of critical factors”. Proc. Second Int’l Workshop Software Eng. for Cloud Computing
Tran V, Keung JW, Liu A, Fekete A. “Size estimation of cloud migration projects with cloud migration point (CMP)” International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM 2011) Alberta, Canada: Banff; 2011. [ Google Scholar ]
Vu QH, Asal R. “Legacy application migration to the cloud: practicability and methodology”, SERVICES, 2012 IEEE Eighth World Congress on Services, pp. 270–277. doi:10.1109/SERVICES.2012.47. 2012. [ Google Scholar ]
Ward C, Aravamudan N, Bhattacharya K, Cheng K, Filepp R, Kearney R, Peterson B, Shwartz L, Young C. Workload migration into clouds - challenges, experiences, opportunities. Florida, USA: IEEE CLOUD 2010; 2010. pp. 164–171. [ Google Scholar ]
Yam CY, Baldwin A, Shiu S, Ioannidis C (2011) “Migration to cloud as real option: investment decision under uncertainty,” trust, security and privacy in computing and communications (TrustCom), 2011 IEEE 10th International Conference on, vol., no., pp.940,949, 16–18 Nov. 2011.doi:10.1109/TrustCom.2011.130
Yu D, Jian W, Bo H, Jianxiao L, Xiuwei Z, Keqing H, Liang-Jie Z. “A practical architecture of cloudification of legacy applications,” services (SERVICES), 2011 IEEE World Congress on, vol., no., pp.17,24, 4–9 July 2011. doi:10.1109/SERVICES.2011.84. 2011. [ Google Scholar ]
Zardari S, Bahsoon R (2011) Cloud Adoption: a goal-oriented requirements engineering Approach. In: the Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Workshop on Cloud Software Engineering, the ACM/IEEE 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). Hawaii, USA.
Zhang W, Berre AJ, Roman D, Huru HA (2009). Migrating legacy applications to the service Cloud. In: 14th conference companion on object oriented programming systems languages and applications (OOPSLA 2009). Orlando, Florida, USA, 25–29 October 2009; pp. 59–68.

IMAGES

Research HQ
(PDF) Cloud Migration Research: A Systematic Review
Preparation for a Successful Cloud Migration
8 benefits of cloud migration & how to migrate
Beginners Complete Guide for Cloud Migration
Cloud Migration

VIDEO

Migrating Applications to cloud&Approaches for cloud migration
Cloud Migration and Solutions
Cloud Migration
Cloud Migration Strategies
Cloud Migration Primer Essential Strategies to Ensure Success
Mastering Cloud Migration: 5 Key Considerations for Seamless Migration in Hybrid Cloud Environments

COMMENTS

(PDF) Cloud Migration Research: A Systematic Review
Objective--This paper aims to identify, taxonomically classify, and systematically compare existing research on cloud migration. Method--We conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) of 23 ...
Key Opportunities and Challenges of Data Migration in Cloud: Results
The results of this research paper can give a road map for the data migration journey and can help decision makers towards a safe and productive migration to a cloud computing environment. Â© 2019 The Authors. ... Cloud migration strategies with the definition SN Cloud Migration Strategies Definition 1 Re-hosting Re-hosting also known as ...
Cloud Migration Research: A Systematic Review
In recent years, research in cloud migration has been carried out. However, there is no secondary study to consolidate this research. Objective--This paper aims to identify, taxonomically classify, and systematically compare existing research on cloud migration. Method--We conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) of 23 selected studies ...
Legacy systems to cloud migration: A review from the architectural
This paper reviews the current legacy to cloud migration approaches encompassing pre-migration, migration, and post-migration stages ... -RMM) to present distinct migration processes and crosscutting concerns. The author's findings indicate that while cloud migration research has progressed and is becoming more established, there is still a ...
A systematic literature Review: Risk analysis in cloud migration
The importance of the SLR method in this research is that researchers can identify and analyze journals systematically according to the recommended stages related to journals about the types and components of risk in cloud migration. The steps in Fig. 1 start from selecting the database source.
A Systematic Literature Review on Cloud Computing Adoption and Migration
No papers were found in this SLR before 2009. This is an evidence of the interest on migration and services provided by the cloud. We found 68 papers (93,15% of the total) between 2011 and 2015. The reason to have only 1 papers selected in 2016 is that in this year we considered only papers published until June.
Cloud Migration Research: A Systematic Review
The review reveals that cloud migration research is still in early stages of maturity, but is advancing, and identifies the needs for a migration framework to help improving the maturity level and consequently trust into cloud migration. Background--By leveraging cloud services, organizations can deploy their software systems over a pool of resources. However, organizations heavily depend on ...
Cloud Migration Research
Conclusion—This review reveals that cloud migration research is still in early stages of maturity, but is advancing. It identifies the needs for a migration framework to help improving the maturity level and consequently trust into cloud migration. This review shows a lack of tool support to automate migration tasks.
Exploring the Challenges of Cloud Migrations During a Global Pandemic
The focus of this paper is to shed light on the challenges software engineers face performing cloud migrations during a global pandemic. A proposed set of research questions will be used to determine the challenges remote software engineers face, as well as the tools and methodologies used during the cloud migration process. Future work will ...
A comprehensive framework for cloud computing migration using Meta
This section discusses prior research in cloud computing migration. Khan and Al-Yasiri (2016) show that the lack of knowledge about cloud computing is one of the main obstacles in adoption and migration to the cloud. ... The results of this research paper can give a road map for the data migration journey and can help decision makers towards a ...
PDF Cloud Migration Research: A Systematic Review
research in cloud migration has been carried out. However, there is no secondary study to consolidate this research. This paper aims to identify, taxonomically classify and systematically compare existing research on cloud migration. We conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) of 23 selected studies, published from 2010 to 2013.
Strategies and Methods for Cloud Migration
In this paper, we review the research achievements and application status on cloud migration, make a comprehensive analysis of existing migration methods, classify them into five migration strategies, and finally identify the corresponding considerations of each respective strategy. Migration strategy is used to classify cloud migration on the ...
the Journal of Systems and Software (JSS) Cloud Migration Process A
Cloud Migration Process A Survey, Evaluation Framework, and Open Challenges Mahdi Fahmideh, Graham Low, Ghassan Beydoun, Farhad Daneshgar ... describes proposed evaluation framework designed for the purpose of this paper. Section 4 presents the research methodology. Section 4 reports the findings of the review after identifying the existing ...
Cloud Migration Research: A Systematic Review
Objective--This paper aims to identify, taxonomically classify, and systematically compare existing research on cloud migration. Method--We conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) of 23 selected studies, published from 2010 to 2013. We classified and compared the selected studies based on a characterization framework that we also ...
An Effective Approach to Cloud Migration for Small and Medium
The motivation for writing this paper is to provide an effective approach to cloud migration for SMEs by proposing a comprehensive and detailed framework. The goal is to help SMEs understand the basic terminology of cloud computing and how they can map out a migration to on-premises cloud services. Published in: 2020 IEEE International ...
Exploring the factors influencing the cloud computing adoption: a
The paper has also endeavored to consolidate the research on Security issues, which is prime factor hindering the adoption of cloud through classifying the studies on secure cloud migration. SLR (Systematic Literature Review) of thirty selected papers, published from 2009 to 2014 was conducted to properly understand the nuances of the security ...
Cloud migration process—A survey, evaluation framework, and open
This paper is structured as follows: In Section 2, we give a general review of terms related to the cloud migration, key challenges that need to be addressed in a typical migration process, and the related work to this paper. Section 3 describes proposed evaluation framework designed for the purpose of this paper.
cloud migration Latest Research Papers
Cloud Migration . Sector Organisation. This research explores critical aspects of procurement of ICT cloud services for South Australian public sector organisations with the case of South Australia Police (SAPOL) for evaluation. SAPOL as one of the state government agencies at the time is initiating this transition to the cloud environment.
Exploring the factors influencing the cloud computing adoption: a
The research on cloud migration is incomplete without talking about SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture. As both cloud migration and SOA exhibit numerous similarities as well as differences at the same time, it would not be appropriate to position the study on cloud migration without SOA migration. ... There are quite few papers on the partial ...

Cloud Migration Research - A Systematic Literature Review

Related Papers

RELATED PAPERS

Strategies and Methods for Cloud Migration

Cite this article

Similar content being viewed by others

Model Based Migration of Cloud Systems: Review and Roadmap

An Overview of Approaches for the Migration of Applications to the Cloud

Cloud Migration Tools: Overview and Comparison

1 Introduction

2 Migration strategy

3 Migration to IaaS and PaaS

3.2 Migration to PaaS

4 Migration related SaaS and comparison among strategies

4.1 Migration to SOA

4.2 Migration related SaaS

4.3 Comparison between the migration strategies

5 Related development tools

6 Challenges and future work

1) Holistic methodology

2) Scalability in IaaS

3) Usage of essential cloud characteristics

4) Architecture refactoring

5) Integrated development environment

6) Other research topics

7) Our ongoing work

i) Software structure recovery

ii) Service identification

iii) Model refactoring

7 Conclusion

Author information

Corresponding author

Additional information

Rights and permissions

About this article

Share this article

An Effective Approach to Cloud Migration for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs)

Purchase Details

Profile Information

Exploring the factors influencing the cloud computing adoption: a systematic study on cloud migration

1 Introduction

2 Related work

3 Research methodology

Methodology

Planning the review

Stages involved in planning review

Development of review protocol

Search strategy

Search string

Inclusion criteria

Exclusion criteria

Survey on secure migration process

Participants

Discussion protocol

4 A 5-phase model for classification and comparison of cloud migration research

Phase-1: Feasibility study [5 studies]

Phase-2: Requirement analysis & migration planning [18 Studies]

Phase-3: Migration execution [15 Studies]

Phase-4: Testing & migration validation [6 Studies]

Phase-5: Monitoring & maintenance [4 Studies]

Key factors for migration

Challenges in cloud migration process

Existing processes or frameworks for secure cloud migration

Current state and ongoing research issues in secure cloud migration

Author information

Corresponding author

Additional information

Authors’ contributions

Authors’ information

Rights and permissions

About this article

Share this article

cloud migration Recently Published Documents

The Impact of Cloud Computing on the IT Support Function

1.6 AUTH | Risiko Cloud-Migration: Wie man Zugriffe auf Cloud-Ressourcen absichert und überwacht

A Literature Review on the Readiness for Providing Cloud Services Locally in Yemen﻿

Migration Issues in Cloud Computing

A Conceptual Framework for Secure Cloud Migration

The Structural Modeling of Significant Factors for Sustainable Cloud Migration

Exploring the factors influencing the cloud computing adoption: a systematic study on cloud migration

A Literature Review on the Readiness for Providing Cloud Services Locally in Yemen