Beyond Barriers: Constructing the Cloud Migration Complexity Index for China’s Digital Transformation

In the digital era, cloud computing stands as a pivotal tool in the transformative journey of enterprises, with China’s tech landscape serving as a prime exemplar. However, when enterprises embrace cloud computing, they face complex hurdles, mainly technical ones. To understand how the complexity of cloud migration affects their digital transformation, our research meticulously constructed business process models for business deployment in both non-cloud and cloud contexts, spanning the IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS levels. By harnessing China’s public cloud market data, we constructed the Cloud Migration Complexity Index, providing a tangible metric to gauge the intricacies of cloud migration and their implications on digital transformation. The findings illustrate that a decrease in cloud migration complexity significantly accelerates digital transformation, with the reduction in SaaS complexity having the most profound impact. Analyzing businesses of varying scales, the diminishing complexity of SaaS predominantly boosts digital transformation for non-SME enterprises, while reduced PaaS complexity is most beneficial for SMEs. This study advocates for the government to expand the PaaS market and suggest that cloud providers develop more PaaS-based products to optimize cloud migration both technically and economically.