Towards a BPM cloud architecture with data and activity distribution

Nowadays, many organizations use BPM for capturing and monitoring their business processes. The introduction of BPM in an organization may become expensive, because of the upfront investments on software and hardware. Therefore, organizations can choose for a cloud-based BPM system, in which a BPM system can be used in a pay-per-use manner. Opting for cloud-based solutions may normally raise concerns in organizations such as privacy, security, legal constraints and control. By combining cloud-based and traditional BPM, organizations can benefit from the best of both worlds. This paper proposes a distribution solution in which a business process is separated into individual business processes to be executed in the cloud and on-premise. This solution gives users the freedom to place sensitive data and non-computation-intensive activities within the borders of their organization, whereas less sensitive data and computation-intensive activities can be placed in the cloud. In our proposed approach, the business processes for both on-premise and the cloud are created by performing a transformation on the original business processes, guided by a distribution list in which the placement of each activity and data element is defined. This paper discusses the challenges of implementing this transformation.