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

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.