Cloud migration process—A survey, evaluation framework, and open challenges

• The relevant approaches for migrating legacy applications to the cloud are surveyed.
• An extensive analysis of existing approaches on the basis of a set of important criteria/features.
• Important cloud migration activities, techniques, and concerns that need to be properly addressed in a typical cloud migration process are delineated.
• Existing open issues and future research opportunities on the cloud migration research area are discussed.

Moving mission-oriented enterprise software applications to cloud environments is a crucial IT task and requires a systematic approach. The foci of this paper is to provide a detailed review of extant cloud migration approaches from the perspective of the process model. To this aim, an evaluation framework is proposed and used to appraise and compare existing approaches for highlighting their features, similarities, and key differences. The survey distills the status quo and makes a rich inventory of important activities, recommendations, techniques, and concerns that are common in a typical cloud migration process in one place. This enables both academia and practitioners in the cloud computing community to get an overarching view of the process of the legacy application migration to the cloud. Furthermore, the survey identifies a number challenges that have not been yet addressed by existing approaches, developing opportunities for further research endeavours.