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Criteria Development for Small Business Processes Transition to Public Cloud Platform Based on SAAS

Student: Anikanova Mariya

Supervisor: Alexander Fedorovich Morgunov

Faculty: Faculty of Business Informatics

Educational Programme: Master

Year of Graduation: 2014

<p style="text-align: justify;">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;The research is dedicated to one of the latest most popular IT-market trends: cloud solutions. As small businesses often face the challenge of optimizing their business processes without major investments and associated risks, the choice of such business processes for automation often becomes rather difficult. The study tries to answer the question: &quot;How to choose a business process to migrate to public SaaS<span len="523"> clouds?&rdquo;, so the purpose of the project is to develop the set of criteria for the selection of small companies&rsquo; business processes to transit to public cloud platform as SAAS applications. Within the framework of the study small businesses profile and their </span>specificity is defined, usage practices of cloud technology as a tool for small organizations business processes automation are analyzed: some existing cloud solutions divided by the type of business processes they optimize are observed, as well as the current usage practices, limitations and advantages of <span len="4">using </span>SaaS<span len="758">-applications. In the second part of the work, the decision-making model of a small company building its IT infrastructure is described. The main part of the work covers the development of a set of criteria for choosing business processes for transition, which is </span>assessed by experts in order to determine the importance of each criterion. As a result, using the proposed simplified system of quantitative criteria evaluation, the decision-making model is introduced which can help small organizations answer the question about the transition of its business processes to the public cloud. At the end of the work, an example of the developed approach application to the concrete small company&rsquo;s business-process is cited. In conclusion, there are some main results of the work, as well as its future development perspectives.</p><p len="640"><span len="306">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; The study is </span>largely based on the methods of interviewing IT experts in public clouds sphere and expert assessment, as well as on the analysis of the current practices of small companies cloud solutions usage. The methods of literature analysis and a special small business market research performed by some third-party organizations by the order of Microsoft corporation where is the author is working are also applied.</p><p len="705"><span len="608">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; The work is intended for a wide range of audiences: first, it is small companies business decision makers, </span>as the roles most responsible for strategic management in organizations. The second part of the audience who might be interested in the study are the companies developing IT solutions for business. In particular, it will be useful for specialists in this field to learn about current trends on the market of cloud solutions for small businesses, as well as to trace the decision-making process for building company IT infrastructure in accordance with its business needs and so to understand the directions of SaaS applications development that will be most in-demand on the market.</p><p len="536" style="text-align: justify;"><span len="439">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Finally, the last part of the audience potentially interested in the research topic are companies already selling SaaS solutions. Using the developed set of criteria for small organizations&rsquo; business processes transition to public cloud platform, the reader will be able to understand how </span>one or another tool-independent benefit of cloud-based platform can help companies make their businesses more efficient and thus sell their own solution more successfully.</p>

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