Quantitative assessment of applications for cloud bursting

Cloud bursting is a deployment model in cloud computing that allows organizations to utilize additional computing resources temporarily from the public cloud, for running certain heavy-duty applications. However, not all applications in an organization are suitable for cloud bursting, due to several reasons. Cloud bursting of applications is constrained by the way those applications are built and deployed inside an organization´s internal IT infrastructure. While certain applications may allow cloud bursting from an architecture perspective, they may not yield the anticipated business outcomes. Thus, without a formal assessment of applications, organizations cannot identify the ones that could produce maximum business benefits from the cloud bursting model. In this paper, we discuss an assessment framework that we could use to evaluate applications for their suitability for cloud bursting. The framework makes use of a parameter based approach where an application´s cloud bursting suitability is measured using a number of relevant parameters. We also present three case studies where we have applied this framework and scored the applications using a selected set of assessment parameters.