Functional Ontology: A business user-friendly method to select Cloud services based on functional requirements of business

Abstract

Cloud services, with its various models of comprehensiveness, are gaining more and more popularity among businesses. This raises a concern about which cloud service provider fits the best to their organizational needs – which is highly customized. Understanding this, from an academic point of view, there is a variety of literature describing frameworks and approaches for organizations to choose the most suitable cloud provider. Amongst these literatures, methods to choose non-functional requirements of the business (such as availability of the service, cloud capacity, etc.) are focused. Methods for functional requirements are not paid enough attention to. This Master Thesis addresses this gap and proposes an approach to aid the cloud service selection process based on the functional requirements of the business.From a methodological point of view, the design science research (DSR) was used. The thesis was organized according to 5 phases of the design science research. The data were collected through literature review, online searches and interviews.The Thesis generated an artefact, which is an ontology-based method to select cloud provider based on functional requirements. This is called Functional Ontology (FO). FO was critically evaluated and its business user-friendliness factor was confirmed. At the end of the thesis, some suggestions for further researches were proposed.