Proposing a Novel Assessment Framework for Evaluation of Public Cloud Service Providers

This paper introduces a novel assessment framework designed for evaluating public cloud service providers. The proposed framework distinguishes between long-established companies with substantial physical infrastructure and emerging smaller firms that require supportive policies and incentives. It evaluates providers on two aspects: technological capabilities and innovation. In this framework, the primary indicators is structured around six key criteria: Legal, Physical Infrastructure, Active Cloud Service Infrastructure, Services and Applications, Business, and Security. Also, the supplementary indicators is based on service panel and innovation. Evaluation indicators and their weights are proposed based on a thorough review of existing standards and benchmarks. To validate the framework’s applicability, we applied it to assess five cloud service providers in Iran alongside three major international providers. The evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in ranking public cloud service providers. Keywords-cloud computing, cloud service provider, criteria, assessment, framework.