Assisting Business Process Outsourcing to the Cloud

The business/IT alignment is an important concept as it creates a coherence between business goals and vision and the IT strategies and decisions. The adoption of cloud computing is one of the IT strategies that is increasingly being considered by several enterprises. When enterprises focalize on the business process outsourcing to the cloud, many issues should be tackled such as its suitability as an environment for running the business process, the selection of parts of business process to be outsourced, and the depiction of the most suitable cloud providers for its execution. This papers major contribution is a decision method framework presenting guidelines to support decision makers aiming to outsource their SOA-based business process to the cloud. The framework assists experts in the fastidious task of analyzing and resolving the BPO problem and its relevance to enterprises context. Its top-down characteristic allows for the study of the enterprise business needs, lacks, and perspectives and the depiction of the implied IT resources creating thus a harmonious correspondence between the two levels which is very demanded in enterprises to guarantee their persistence in the economic markets.