Hybrid Clouds Arising from Software as a Service Adoption: Challenges, Solutions, and Future Research Directions

Abstract

Information technology (IT) departments are increasingly challenged to replace legacy applications with novel public cloud software as a service (SaaS) to innovate the organization's business processes. The resulting hybrid cloud is formed by integrating the added SaaS with existing IT services. The decision to adopt SaaS in such a hybrid cloud service composition requires appropriate consideration of the respective service level agreements (SLA) to ensure the proper execution of the supported business process. Previous studies focused strongly on cloud service selection or SLA negotiation rather than functionally desired SaaS adoption from the perspective of the hybrid cloud provider as integrator. This research paper identifies economic and technical issues in hybrid cloud arising from SaaS adoption and discusses challenges and existing solutions. A structured literature survey revealed that 52 issues in 36 identified publications are transferable to our context. These issues were classified in six different challenges. We were able to explore the relations between solution artifacts of various challenges and provide guidance for future research concerning hybrid clouds. The relations between the challenges are also found to vary in their research maturity and offer promising fields for further research.