A Dynamic Decision Support System for Selection of Cloud Storage Provider

Abstract

In recent years, the cloud computing model has gained increasing attention and popularity in the field of information technology. For this reason, people are migrating their applications to public, private, or hybrid cloud environments. Many cloud vendors offer similar features with varying costs, so an appropriate choice will be the key to guaranteeing comparatively low operational costs for an organization. The motivation for this work is the necessity to select an appropriate cloud storage provider offering for the migration of applications with less cost and high performance. However, the selection of a suitable cloud storage provider is a complex problem that entails various technical and organizational aspects. In this research, a dynamic Decision Support System (DSS) for selection of an appropriate cloud storage provider is proposed. A web-based application is implemented using PHP and MySQL to facilitate decision makers. The proposed mechanism has been optimized in a way that enables the system to address static database issues for which a user might not acquire the best solution. It focuses on comparing and ranking cloud storage providers by using two modules: scraping and parsing. The evaluation of the proposed system is carried out with appropriate test cases and compared with existing tools and frameworks.

Keywords

• cloud computing
• decision support system
• cloud storage
• ranking