A Framework for Software-as-a-Service Selection and Provisioning

As cloud computing is increasingly transforming the information technology landscape, organizations and businesses are exhibiting strong interest in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings that can help them increase business agility and reduce their operational costs. They increasingly demand services that can meet their functional and non-functional requirements. Given the plethora and the variety of SaaS offerings, we propose, in this paper, a framework for SaaS provisioning, which relies on brokered Service Level agreements (SLAs), between service consumers and SaaS providers. The Cloud Service Broker (CSB) helps service consumers find the right SaaS providers that can fulfil their functional and non-functional requirements. The proposed selection algorithm ranks potential SaaS providers by matching their offerings against the requirements of the service consumer using an aggregate utility function. Furthermore, the CSB is in charge of conducting SLA negotiation with selected SaaS providers, on behalf of service consumers, and performing SLA compliance monitoring.