Assessing cloud computing SaaS adoption for enterprise applications using a Petri net MCDM framework

Abstract

Cloud computing has become a very popular technology for IT infrastructure (infrastructure as a service - IaaS), with big players offering attractive pricing schemes. Software vendors are interested in offering products in the cloud as services. However, in order to evaluate software as an offer of service (SaaS) for a given enterprise application, we need to assess some qualitative factors other than just price-security and trust being the most relevant factors. In this work, we propose a Petri net multi- criteria decision making (MCDM) framework to evaluate SaaS as opposed to an on-premises alternative. The proposed framework can help IT managers in deciding between the two options, as well as being able to help software vendors in their efforts to establish SaaS pricing.