A Comprehensive Framework for Business Process Outsourcing to the Cloud

The lack of a framework that provides for business process outsourcing to the cloud hinders the widespread adoption of this emerging computing environment. Unlike the multiple decision methods related to outsourcing classical applications in a cloud environment, there is no standard dealing with the outsourcing of business processes starting from the enterprise business concerns to select the appropriate business process to be outsourced, to a finer level of decision to select the business process fragments to be supported by the cloud. In this paper, we first present an end-to-end framework that addresses some of these shortages. The presented framework, entitled Business Process Outsourcing to the cloud (BPO2C), covers the outsourcing process lifecyle. Indeed, the BPO2C framework elaborates several phases pertinent to the outsourcing decision, starting from the elaboration of the enterprise business motivations to identify the implied business process in the outsourcing decision, to the identification of outsourceable process fragments to minimize the business process costs, duration and to mitigate cloud risks.

I. Introduction

The cloud computing paradigm has gained an increasing attention due to its promised shift in the way of provisioning computing resources and expertise. This paradigm offers access to and management of physical resources in a ubiquitous way by leveraging storage and computing tools in addition to applications in a virtual manner. Indeed, accessing a pool of available resources requires only an Internet access, and users are supposed to pay only for what they consume. This new way of provisioning software and hardware resources alleviates users from the costs and burden of installing and managing the costly Information Technology (IT) to support intensive computing applications.