Cloud service prioritization using a Multi-Criteria Decision-Making technique in a cloud computing environment

Abstract

Many companies are now moving their business to the cloud because the cloud provides user with unlimited resources and uninterrupted service. The aim of the paper is to rank services provided by a set of cloud-providers based on multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods. The ranking of the cloud-providers set is based on the Interval neutrosophic set theory (INS). The paper proposes INS and TOPSIS techniques to help users and experts express their evaluations and rank cloud-providers based on various criteria. INS is used to deal with the imprecise knowledge, generated by the ambiguity from the experts' evaluations. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework, the closeness index (CI) values of CSPs were ranked in decreasing order. A numerical example for a case study for a set 6 CSP and 10 criteria is presented. The numerical results show that SoftLayer's is the best cloud-provider with a CI value equal to 0.69. The worst cloud-provider is Microsoft Azure with a CI value equal to 0.20. A sensitivity analysis was performed to check the consistency and robustness of the model.