Business Cloudification – An Enterprise Architecture Perspective
Cloud computing is emerging as a promising enabler of some aspects of the ‘agile’ and ‘lean’ features that businesses need to display in today’s hyper-competitive and disruptive global economic ecosystem. However, it is increasingly obvious that there are essential prerequisites and caveats to cloudification that businesses need to be aware of in order to avoid pitfalls. This paper aims to present a novel, Enterprise Architecture-based approach towards analysing the cloudification endeavour, adopting a holistic paradigm that takes into account the mutual influences of the entities and artefacts involved, in the context of their life cycles. As shown in the paper, this approach enables a richer insight into the ‘readiness’ of a business considering embarking on a cloudification endeavour and therefore empowers management to evaluate consequences of- and take cognisant decisions on the cloudification extent, type, provider etc. based on prompt information of appropriate quality and deta