International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887) Volume 56– No.4, October 2012 1 Fly over the Clouds or Drive through the Crowd: A Cloud Adoption Framework in Action Eman M. Ezzat Doaa S. Elzanfaly Mostafa A. Mostafa Informatics and Computer Sciences Informatics and Computer Sciences Computing and Information technology The British University in Egypt, ICS Faculty- Helwan Univ. & The British Univ. in Egypt Arab Academy for Science and Technology Cairo, Egypt Cairo, Egypt Cairo, Egypt ABSTRACT Flying over the clouds or driving through the crowd, to work in an auto-managed and scalable environment or to get overwhelmed with the management as well as the development techniques and costly resources. That is a common problem facing most small to medium sized organizations. Cloud computing has been a breakthrough recently helping in the emergence of new resources, management, and services sharing between users and providers. With the consideration of the quality of services as a crucial factor for evaluating any service, the decision of adopting the new cloud techniques or remain in premise is one of the problems that faces the decision makers. The work proposed in this paper concentrates on surveying and studying the cloud among different professionals’ perspectives and researches to be able to determine the most important and common aspects that affect the decision of cloud adoption. Furthermore, it considers in action the quality of services that are proposed to be the most effective while deciding. The factors determined are classified and used to set the infrastructure of building a full framework to facilitate the user's adoption decision. An evaluation model is proposed as well to measure the efficiency of the framework within real life. Keywords Cloud computing; Cloud adoption; quality of service; measurements factors. 1. Introduction Flying over the clouds or driving through the crowd, that is the concern nowadays for most users. After the globalization has given the chance to small and medium enterprises to leverage ahead along with large ones; still the problem has always been the resources availability and limited capabilities. Cloud computing concept was exposed recently global wide offering the following capabilities: services and resources sharing, external information storing, full availability, auto- scalability and most importantly pay-as-you-go or the services renting concept. The concept of Cloud computing is not new; it has been introduced in 1969; the evolution paradigm began at the entrance of the new millennium 2000; allowing the users to work with only needed resources, services, and budget. With the introduction to the new concept (software as a service) people started to learn and interact with the cloud in many fields [1]. Although flying (Cloud usage) is much faster, more flexible and proved to be efficient enough to begin working, driving through the crowd (on-premise usage) is still considered as the safe choice to most of the users nowadays. The main reasons are: lacking the knowledge of the cloud concept, the working strategy compatibility issues, as whether adopting cloud technologies will be applicable to specific working environment or not, and finally, the ability of measuring the cloud adoption benefits, outcomes, compatibility factors and consequences , and functionality evaluation. Previous Researches [2-9] basically concentrate on defining cloud computing, studying its architecture and capabilities without discovering if it is possible for a business field to use cloud technologies or not. Further they do not allow new users to define their problem and evaluate their decision based on specific influential factors. Outcomes measurements, security, management and other aspects are all considered as after cloud adoption factors for the users and professionals. The Provided quality of the services takes a huge part of the consideration and assessment. This paper surveys and studies the cloud among different professionals’ perspective and researches to be able to determine the most important and common aspects that affect the decision of cloud adoption. A full framework is proposed based on the factors studied as an infrastructure for supporting the users’ decision. In addition, the measurements criteria and assessment methods of the framework are also presented to be used for application evaluation. A preliminary version of the framework is proposed in [10]. However, after studying the concerns of applying the preliminary framework in real-life cases, further updates are proposed to consider more effective aspects. The quality assessment and framework components efficiency evaluation is a target. After studying different assessment techniques, strategies and criteria [11], [12] another room of updates is given for enhancement and ensuring the efficiency measurements of the framework components. Some factors, such as customizability and configurability, proved to be of great importance. Through this paper both factors are studied in more details. In addition, a model of measuring the influence of the configurability and customizability levels is proposed among the other evaluation criteria.