This model can also be used for the decision processes of other companies in the same situation. These companies would need to complete a pairwise comparison round of “mission to objective” and “objective to criteria” with their business leaders. If changes in the market are not great, the cloud expert’s judgment of the criteria to strategy could be reused to save time. However, if the cloud market has changed greatly, then the cloud expert tier should be re-evaluated before making conclusions.
Moving to the cloud is a daunting prospect for any company, large or small. In addition to choosing which Internet Service Provider (ISP) to align with, the company must first determine a strategy of where they should house their data, codebase and business processes during the migration. It must also determine which of their business systems should be targeted for the cloud. Concerns about data placement (on-premise or off-premise?) or a hybrid placement must be considered before engaging an ISP.
This paper will now describe the three broad types of internet service strategies: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, as well as present an HDM structure for choosing a service strategy.
The goal of this paper was to create an HDM model that other companies could use as a basis for their decision-making. This model was designed, in particular, for a fictional company, BMF LLC, and the value judgments are based solely upon the priorities of a small company with limited staff, retail and supply chain websites, and the need to focus on its core business.
2.Company Profile
BMF LLC is a 3-year-old start-up headquartered in Portland, Oregon. In addition to its Portland office, the company also has locations in China and Mexico, which are primarily focused on manufacturing.
BMF is set up to be a luxury fashion online retailer that will style and groom male executives who desire to look great at work. This company will send a pre-selected and ready-to-wear outfit to the customer, who can then choose to send unwanted items back at no cost. BMF also has an online retail presence that is hosted on a premise with several servers dedicated to the supply chain, including custom applications for their stylists.
The company is currently funded by venture capital and has ramped up to 100 employees. Of those employees, there are two IT support staff, five developers and one IT manager. The IT manager and support staff handle both the server support for the website and supply chain software, as well as employee hardware and software issues. Collaboration cloud software has been used in this company since it was funded, and support for this is included in software support. The IT manager spends 50% of his time as a support staff and thus would like to have more time to focus on IT strategy instead.
The five developers consist of the following: a Python developer on internal tools that are custom to this company, two front-end developers for the website (and as needed on the tools’ User Interface (UI)), and two java and python developers to develop server side code for the website and supply chain integration.
3.IT Strategy and Considerations
The IT staff has come to the consensus that the following systems will be targeted to move to an off-premise cloud solution:
•Website—bestmensfashion.com—java and python.
•Supply chain servers with custom java and python applications.
Based on these targeted technology systems, this HDM project will evaluate the three cloud strategies (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS) and determine which one will be the most successful for BMF. Further evaluation, following the service type decision, will be needed to choose the right ISP vendor.
3.1.Benefits of cloud
The IT and Business staff have evaluated that the benefits of moving to the cloud are large with regard to long-term and on-demand scalability, which is needed due to business projections of 20% year on year growth of website traffic as well as seasonal demand that will cause fluctuations to the number of users. It is expected that website uptime will be increased after moving to a cloud model, due to failover and redundancy mechanisms.
An additional benefit is that the core business of creating the best experience for the customer can be the focus on more of its employees. For example, IT staff can be less tasked with maintaining the server lab, and be more targeted on employee support and creating web applications needed for this unique product experience.
3.2.Challenges of cloud
One of the largest challenges for BMF’s cloud strategy is that the migration process will be complex, both technical- and process-wise. Technically, the migration will involve moving all the codes, data and developers to the cloud model. One of our highest concerns is addressing privacy issues for both company secrets and customer data.
There are also substantial business migration concerns, for example, the BMF’s supply chain processes are executed by non-technical business analysts and stylists. Training (for the new site) is needed for these non-technical users to prepare them for possible differences once the code is migrated. All processes will need to be tested and validated before the new site and supply chain are opened for business. It should be expected that there are difficulties in this process and possibly downtime if the migration process is not tightly managed.
Another concern is the high costs of a cloud solution. The management expects that there will be substantial upfront costs for the technical migration, training and time spent on training their employees. Reoccurring monthly costs will also need to be managed, but that management strategy will largely be dependent upon which ISP is ultimately chosen, as an ISP’s monthly costs can vary due to support tiers, time of day and the amount of data.
Off-premise cloud solutions inherently create a dependence on the ISP. This dependence will be for mission critical systems. In the case of BMF, if their systems go offline, business can suffer. If their systems are hacked, the company’s reputation and trust can be lost. Thus, in the event of such scenarios, businesses have a foundational reliance upon their ISPs. In spite of this, BMF’s management still continues to desire the move due to the obvious benefits.
4.Literature Review
Hierarchical Decision Modeling (HDM) is a technical tool used in project selection, resource allocation and evaluation decisionmaking. Its objective is to assist the user, by a series of pairwise comparisons, to reach quantifiable judgmental value using ratio scales. The underlying assumption is that each decision has a number of perspectives and each perspective has number of criteria to consider [1].
Thus, combining the perspectives—quantifiable or non-quantifiable—and the supporting criteria will help in determining the strategy (decision). The HDM is a process using multi-level decisions and utilizing multiple criteria by separating the overall system into several hierarchical levels.
The HDM is also a process based on reaching out to an independent panel of selected experts, who responds to questions by dividing 100 points between two alternatives at a time. The allocation of the points represents each expert’s independent judgment with respect to a specific criterion. The 100-point scale is from 1 to 99. The zero value is avoided to eliminate mathematical difficulties; however, if such a consideration is given, each expert selects 50 points. This means the judgment is neither important nor unimportant [1].
The HDM is based on a pairwise comparison analysis using linear algebra and matrix analysis. The goal is to find the eigenvalue and the eigenvector for each consideration in the matrix.