Migration Goals and Risk Management in Cloud Computing: A Review of State of the Art and Survey Results on Practitioners

Abstract

Organizations are now seriously considering adopting cloud into the existing business context, but migrating data, application and services into cloud doesn't come without substantial risks. These risks are the significant barriers for the wider cloud adoption. There are works that consolidate the existing work on cloud migration and technology. However, there is no secondary study that consolidates the state of the art research and existing practice on risk management in cloud computing. It makes difficult to understand the risks management trend, maturity, and research gaps. This paper investigates the state of the art research and practices relating to risk management in cloud computing and discusses survey results on migration goals and risks. The survey participants are practitioners from both public and private organizations of two different locations, i.e., UK and Malaysia. The authors identify and classify the relevant literature and systematically compare the existing works and survey results. The results show that most of the existing works do not consider the existing organization and business context for the risk assessment. The authors' study results also reveal that risk management in cloud computing research and practice is still not in a mature stage but gradually advancing. Finally, they propose a risk assessment approach and determine the relative importance of the migration goals from two real migration use cases.