Figure 2.Team 1 HDM model.

      This mission is a common scenario many businesses face, where there are pros and cons to moving their IT infrastructure from in-house to the cloud. There are many cloud service options a company must evaluate and this model is designed to aid in choosing which cloud service model a business should move its operations to. This model does not recommend any specific cloud service provider, though it does recommend choosing one of the three cloud service options (SaaS, PaaS or IaaS). Additional models would be required to choose a specific provider.

      5.2.Objectives

      The HDM model consists of four criteria (see Figure 2): Technical, Security, Economic and Management. Objectives were chosen based on a thorough analysis of expert opinions and literature reviews. When a business is looking to move its services to the cloud, they are looking for specific benefits to the company. Examples include increased focus on business, faster time to market, increased business agility, reduced operational costs, and lower development costs. These four objectives cover all the concerns and objectives a company must consider when moving its IT services to the cloud. It is important to note that additional objectives were evaluated and considered by the team. These four objectives were deemed to be the most important objectives a company must evaluate. Due to time limitations on the scope of this project, no more than four objectives were added to the model. More objectives could be added to future models, for example, Political.

      1.Technical objective: Evaluating technical considerations when deciding to move operations to a cloud service.

      2.Security objective: Evaluating security considerations when deciding to move operations to a cloud service.

      3.Economic objective: Evaluating financial considerations when deciding to move operations to a cloud service.

      4.Management objective: Evaluating business/management considerations when deciding to move operations to a cloud service.

      5.3.Criteria

      The criteria in Figure 2 consist of two criteria per objective. Due to time limitations on the scope of this project, no more than two criteria per objective were added to this model. The original model consisted of four criteria per objective. To narrow this down to only two expert opinions, a literature review was used to reduce the number of criteria by 50%.

      1.Technical criteria: Technical objectives (see Figure 2) consisted of two criteria: Scalability and Migration—Technical Complexity.

      i.Scalability includes speed, latency and reliability. This criterion would pertain to the company’s current technical architecture and to which cloud service strategy would create the best scalability for the business. Scalability is a criterion all businesses must consider when deciding on a cloud service strategy.

      ii.Migration—Technical Complexity pertains to the company’s current technical architecture and to which cloud service strategy would allow for the most efficient migration to the cloud. Migration can be a very costly endeavor with little Return on Investment (ROI) if it is not evaluated properly. Examples include trying to move existing services to a cloud service strategy that does not support current infrastructure.

      2.Security criteria: Security objectives consisted of two criteria: Protection and Migration—Compliance to New Standards.

      i.Protection refers to security measures in regard to data center protection (e.g., building, fire, surveillance, etc.), communication protection (e.g., data encryption, secure cryptographic protocols, firewall, etc.) and operation protection (e.g., access control, role management, virus protection, etc.).

      ii.Migration — Compliance to New Standards is a method that will help companies to avoid being fined for compliance violations, and to manage risk factors as well as processes and decision rights. Examples include cloud encryption standards (FIPS 140-2), Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security standard and identity management that monitor application access and authorization.

      3.Economic criteria: Economic objectives consisted of two criteria: Service Charge and Migration — Costs.

      i.Service Charge defines how the cloud service strategy is charged. Examples include volume-based, time-based and account-based. This criterion also considers the available booking concept, such as pay-per-use, subscription fee and market-based prices.

      ii.Migration — Costs refers to the costs to consider when moving existing infrastructure to the specified cloud service model.

      4.Management criteria: Management objectives consisted of two criteria: Support Capabilities and Migration — Business Complexity.

      i.Support Capabilities refer to the support offered and the mechanism (e.g., phone, online, etc.) it is under. This includes information such as multilingual support, worldwide offices and local contact options.

      ii.Migration — Business Complexity defines the business complexity in migrating the business from its current solution to the cloud service strategy. This includes all management functionality including training time and the ease of moving employees over to the new platform.

      5.4.Strategy

      The Strategy of this model refers to the cloud service strategy a company should use. To limit the scope of this project, cloud service strategies were narrowed down to the three most common cloud service strategies—IaaS, SaaS and PaaS—that companies move their services to.

      It is important to note this model and strategy do not encompass all the different cloud service providers within a specific cloud service strategy. A different model would need to be created to evaluate a specific provider within a cloud strategy option. Choosing a cloud service strategy will greatly narrow the scope of decisions a company must consider when moving their services to the cloud.

      6.Results and Discussions

      Our expert panel consisted of seven experts—five team members acting as executives from BMF LLC and two external cloud service consultants. All seven members completed the pairwise comparisons on all three levels.

      We conducted two rounds of analysis on the results from the HDM tool. In the first round, we took into account the inputs from the seven experts on all three levels of the pairwise comparisons. Since we have explanations on our Mission, Objectives and Criteria in the online HDM tool, we assumed that all the experts knew the company’s needs, as well as the technical aspects of all the different types of cloud services.

      The results of our first-round analysis show that Security is the company’s top concern,