Towards an Autonomic Outsourcing to the Cloud Decision

Abstract

When enterprises decide to outsource their business processes to the Cloud, various considerations should be tackled. Indeed, the enterprises aim to reduce the business processes investment cost, to enhance their performance, and to focus on the enterprise core competency while considering security constraints. Hence, it is essential to assist enterprises to take the suitable decision by providing an appropriate decision system that specifies the activities to be outsourced as well as the Cloud resource to support them while considering the above enterprise preferences. Obviously, the outsourcing decision, when taken in a specific business process context, may be influenced by some variants that make it not suitable in another one. For instance, the business process workloads vary according to its execution period and thus the decision may require to change the Cloud resources as well as the outsourced activities to fit the new context requirements. This consideration should be taken when tackling an outsourcing decision to alleviate enterprise experts from the burden of assessing by themselves the changing business processes context and react by consequence to this change. In this paper, we present an adaptive outsourcing decision system, which provides personalized and autonomic decision-making to support the dynamic business process context when outsourced to the Cloud. The system predicts the business process context and provides accordingly appropriate decisions using the penalty based genetic algorithm.