A Decision Support System for Cloud Service Provider Selection Problem in Software Producing Organizations

Cloud computing enables software producing organizations to replace in-house IT infrastructure and provides them with scalable computing and flexible low cost. As cloud vendors and services on offer increase rapidly, cloud service provider selection is becoming a significant challenge for businesses. Cloud service providers and their offered services are characterized using multiple criteria, such as their popularity, geographic location, and deployment model, so it is essential to have a reliable method to select desirable cloud vendors based on decision-makers' requirements. In this study, we present a decision support system that supports decision-makers in choosing the most suitable Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud providers. The case studies and experts confirm that the approach increases insight into the selection process, provides a richer prioritized option list than if they had done their research independently, and reduces the time and cost of the decision-making process.