Key Management Determinants For Cloud Computing Adoption

Although there are a significant number of advantages associated with cloud computing, there is less clarity of what are the key management determinants for cloud computing adoption. This research aims to evaluate the significance of various factors that influence the adoption decision of cloud computing services by organisations within the United Kingdom (UK). The ‘Technology-Organisation-Environment’ (TOE) adoption framework was used to develop eight hypotheses which allowed data collection through a self-created questionnaire based survey that was completed by 257 mid-to-senior level decision making business and IT professionals from a range of UK end-user organisations. The derived hypotheses were tested using various data analysis techniques including factor analysis and logistic regression. The results show that four of the eight factors examined have a significant influence on the adoption decision of cloud computing services in the UK. Those key factors are competitive pressure, complexity, technology readiness and trading partner pressure. The latter predictor; trading partner pressure, had the highest level of significance on the adoption decision of cloud services. The findings reveal how important the environmental context surrounding both the competitive pressure and more importantly trading partner pressure is on cloud adoption. This enables end-user organisations to better evaluate the cloud and vendors the opportunity of improving their offerings.