A Decision-Making Support for Business Process Outsourcing to a Multi-Cloud Environment

Abstract

The business process outsourcing (BPO) remains among the most adopted strategies by organizations to cope with the harsh competition of today's market. This practice has been intensified with the advent of the Cloud computing that has attracted companies by its new way of consuming and paying for resources. Nevertheless, the exposure of business processes (BPs) to Cloud-related threats and non-compliance risks as well as the diversity of Cloud offers in terms of price and quality are ones of the biggest obstacles in BPO to the Cloud. The organizations should therefore examine different factors to determine which BP parts to outsource and to assign them the most suitable Cloud offers. This article proposes a decision-making support called DMS4BPO that helps organizations in outsourcing their BPs to the Cloud by considering security, compliance, cost and performance criteria. DMS4BPO includes on the one hand an AHP-based method for the Cloud offer selection, and on the other hand, a Business Intelligence-based method for the exploitation of the execution history.