A Requirements-Oriented Modelling Language for an Optimized Distribution of Business Processes on a Multi-Cloud Environment

Abstract

Many companies resort to business process outsourcing (BPO) to survive in today's tough competition. This trend has been intensified with the advent of Cloud computing that brings a new way of paying and consuming resources. Nonetheless, preserving companies' knowhow, protecting sensitive data, and ensuring the compliance of business processes (BPs) remain among the most important challenges in BPO to the Cloud. An organization must therefore consider several factors to determine which BP parts should be outsourced and to assign them the most appropriate Cloud offers. This paper proposes an extension of the business process model notation (BPMN) that allows specifying the requirements of BP activities in terms of security, compliance, cost, performance, data transfer, and obfuscation. This extension is intended for the BP modelling phase and aims to assign to each activity the Cloud offer that best meets its requirements.