A Holistic Decision Framework to Avoid Vendor Lock-in for Cloud SaaS Migration

Abstract

Cloud computing offers an innovative business model to enterprise for IT services consumption and delivery. Software as a Service (SaaS) is one of the cloud offerings that attract organisations as a potential solution in reducing their IT cost. However, the vast diversity among the available cloud SaaS services makes it difficult for customers to decide whose vendor services to use or even to determine a valid basis for their selections. Moreover, this variety of cloud SaaS services has led to proprietary architectures and technologies being used by cloud vendors, increasing the risk of vendor lock-in for customers. Therefore, when enterprises interact with SaaS providers within the purview of the current cloud marketplace, they often encounter significant lock-in challenges to migrating and interconnecting cloud. Hence, the complexity and variety of cloud SaaS service offerings makes it imperative for businesses to use a clear and well understood decision process to procure, migrate and/or discontinue cloud services. To date, the expertise and technological solutions to simplify such transition and facilitate good decision making to avoid lock-in risks in the cloud are limited. Besides, little investigation has been carried out to provide a comprehensive decision framework to support enterprises on how to avoid lock-in risks when selecting and implementing cloud-based SaaS solutions within existing environments. Such decision framework is important to reduce complexity and variations in implementation patterns on the cloud provider side, while at the same time minimising potential switching cost for enterprises by resolving integration issues with existing IT infrastructures. This paper proposes a holistic 6-step decision framework that enables an enterprise to assess its current IT landscape for potential SaaS replacement, and provides effective strategies to mitigate vendor lock-in risks in cloud (SaaS) migration. The framework follows research findings and addresses the core requirements for choosing vendor-neutral interoperable and portable cloud services without the fear of vendor lock-in, and architectural decisions for secure SaaS migration. Therefore, the results of this research can help IT managers have a safe and effective migration to cloud computing SaaS environment.

Factors Affecting Intention to Adopt Cloud-Based ERP from a Comprehensive Approach

“…A further review of the literature identified that this issue, often known as the vendor lock-in scenario, occurs very commonly in the cloud environment [79,80]. Opara-Martins [81] studied a decision-making framework to mitigate vendor lock-in risks in (SaaS) cloud migration. Vendor lock-in and switching costs have become two significant obstacles to the retirement of cloud-based ERP systems.…”

Taxonomy of Cloud Lock-in Challenges

“…Prior to presenting the proposed taxonomy, it is worthy to mention that the identification of elements and components of the categorization used is based on the critical review of key literatures in [40][41][42][43][44][45], the preceding section and subsequent sections. This critical review followed the systematic approach proposed by [52].…”

“…As cloud computing adoption rate soars across enterprises (small or large), the risks of vendor lock-in is prevalent. Limited studies exist, except for [40][41][42][43][44], to analyze and highlight the complexity of vendor lock-in problem in the cloud environment. Therefore, when selecting SaaS offerings from cloud vendors, organizations need to consider and balance service criticality against the significance of avoiding potential risks of vendor lock-in.…”

“…However, if the provider does not offer readymade data "export" functionality, the enterprise will need to develop a program to extract their data and write it to a file ready for import to another vendor. It should be noted that database schemas, data formats, and application programming interfaces (APIs) are valuable in providing the function of interoperability of communication and processing within the SaaS cloud [41,44]. However, the closed proprietarily coding of these key components across SaaS vendor offerings results in the need for resource (i.e., human effort, time, and cost) to be focused into developing a solution to break free from having the enterprise data locked into SaaS offerings (e.g., data models, platforms, and programming languages).…”

“…A clear perspective of the main risk factors that contribute to a lock-in situation in the cloud environment and how such risk(s) should be organized to ease decision-making is the main step for having a comprehensive analysis of the status of cloud computing vendor lock-in challenges. To organize the complex and broad data related to cloud lock-in problems and to facilitate further studies in this area, based on our previous work [44], the main problems (i.e., risks or challenges) of cloud lock-in are identified and grouped into a model composing of 11 categories namely: standards, portability, interoperability, security, integration, compatibility, APIs, data, contracts, SLA compliance, and cloud migration (in/out) strategies. These elements are placed in a hierarchical order of significance to the broad lock-in problem, in general.…”