Orig­i­nal source pub­li­ca­tion: Branco Jr., T., F. de Sá-Soares and A. L. Rivero (2017). Key Issues for the Suc­cess­ful Adop­tion of Cloud Com­put­ing. Pro­ceed­ings of the Con­fer­ence on Enter­prise Infor­ma­tion Sys­tems 2017—CEN­TERIS 2017, Pro­ce­dia Com­puter Sci­ence 121, 115–122. Barcelona (Spain).
The final pub­li­ca­tion is avail­able here.

Key Issues for the Suc­cess­ful Adop­tion of Cloud Com­put­ing

Teó­filo Branco Jr.,^a Fil­ipe de Sá-Soares^a and Alfonso Lopez Rivero^b

^a Uni­ver­sity of Minho, Guimarães, Por­tu­gal
^b Pon­tif­i­cal Uni­ver­sity of Sala­manca, Sala­manca, Spain

1. Introduction

Cloud Com­put­ing (CC) has been a major tech­no­log­i­cal trend in recent years, draw­ing the atten­tion of both IT pro­fes­sion­als and researchers. Although many pub­li­ca­tions con­cen­trate on the tech­ni­cal aspects of CC, the focus on orga­ni­za­tional aspects is increas­ingly fre­quent given the inter­est of orga­ni­za­tions in adopt­ing this tech­nol­ogy. The lit­er­a­ture includes works on the process and life cycle that enable the cre­ation of a favor­able set­ting in orga­ni­za­tions to imple­ment CC solu­tions. The review of those works led us to com­pile a list of key issues that may prove use­ful to IT man­agers when they con­sider the orga­ni­za­tional require­ments needed to adopt CC in a secure and effi­cient man­ner.

In this paper we argue that the use­ful­ness of the list of issues may be improved by instill­ing it with the view of prac­ti­tion­ers, namely of those that have con­ducted the migra­tion to CC in their orga­ni­za­tions. Besides hav­ing expe­ri­ence with this kind of tech­nol­ogy, those prac­ti­tion­ers may also have learnt lessons in the imple­men­ta­tion process of CC that are rel­e­vant to other orga­ni­za­tions con­sid­er­ing the path to CC. To this end, this research tar­geted IT providers of CC solu­tions in the region of Castilla y Leon in Spain, where Cloud solu­tions received finan­cial resources of more than one mil­lion euros in 2015 to assist enter­prises of IT sec­tor for the migra­tion or devel­op­ment of soft­ware solu­tions in the cloud [AET­I­CAL 2015]. The analy­sis of the col­lected data pro­vided insights on how to improve the deci­sion-mak­ing process that guides the adop­tion of CC.

2. Cloud Computing

CC are deposits of vir­tu­al­ized IT resources read­ily usable and acces­si­ble, in which the ven­dor war­ranties the use and qual­ity of use of those resources to cus­tomers and the cus­tomers are charged for what they really use [Mell and Grance 2011]. The ven­dors of CC ser­vices pro­vide users with access to IT resources at a lower cost if we con­sider that cus­tomers do not need to acquire and main­tain an IT infra­struc­ture. In addi­tion, CC imple­ments a model for enabling ubiq­ui­tous, on-demand net­work access to a shared pool of con­fig­urable com­put­ing resources that can be rapidly pro­vi­sioned and released with min­i­mal man­age­ment effort or ser­vice provider inter­ac­tion [Mell and Grance 2011]. Table 1 lists five essen­tial char­ac­ter­is­tics of CC.

Table 1: Five Essen­tial Char­ac­ter­is­tics of Cloud Com­put­ing
Adapted from Mell and Grance [2011]

There are var­i­ous advan­tages in the adop­tion of CC. Gutier­rez and Lums­den [2014] high­light the fol­low­ing three main ben­e­fits of CC. The most fre­quent ben­e­fit relates to cost reduc­tion, such as the removal of IT infra­struc­ture in the orga­ni­za­tion along with its direct and indi­rect costs. Resource ratio­nal­iza­tion is another advan­tage since the ser­vice is dynam­i­cally scal­able because users only con­sume the com­put­ing resources they actu­ally use. Porta­bil­ity is another advan­tage as the fea­ture can be accessed not only from any com­puter con­nected to the inter­net, but also from any type of device, such as mobile phones, tablets, lap­tops, or desk­top com­put­ers, and from any geo­graph­i­cal loca­tion.

The focus of this study is on Pub­lic Clouds, the most com­mon type of CC avail­able to indi­vid­ual cus­tomers and run by third par­ties. The option for Pub­lic Clouds results from the belief that in this model of deploy­ment, the explo­ration of IT resources can achieve higher lev­els of opti­miza­tion at lower costs.

Com­pa­nies that wish to move their IT ser­vices to a Pub­lic Cloud face sev­eral chal­lenges. The uncer­tain­ties about the chal­lenges and issues involved in this tech­nol­ogy have been rea­sons for not accept­ing Cloud tech­nol­ogy as a reli­able solu­tion by many orga­ni­za­tions [Con­way and Curry 2010]. Indeed, the migra­tion to CC does not present a clear path: adopt­ing CC with­out proper assess­ment and analy­sis may in itself become a major risk. The lack of cri­te­ria to sup­port IT man­agers’ deci­sion-mak­ing can cause uncer­tain­ties and cre­ate obsta­cles to the adop­tion of this tech­nol­ogy [Duarte and Silva 2013]. Prompted by this gap in the knowl­edge about CC, we con­ducted an exten­sive review of the lit­er­a­ture in order to com­pile issues that point to impor­tant aspects to be observed by orga­ni­za­tions when con­sid­er­ing the migra­tion of their tech­no­log­i­cal struc­ture to CC, specif­i­cally on Pub­lic Clouds. The issues were con­densed in a list orga­nized into five main cat­e­gories as depicted in Table 2.

Table 2: Issues in the Cloud adop­tion

The list of issues sug­gests that the process of migra­tion to CC is a task that should be well planned and con­ducted in order for the suc­cess­ful deploy­ment of CC by an orga­ni­za­tion. Fur­ther­more, the rich­ness of the lit­er­a­ture led to the com­pi­la­tion of a list com­posed of a mul­ti­plic­ity of issues, of dif­fer­ent nature and appar­ently sim­i­lar impor­tance, which demand com­pe­tent man­age­ment by orga­ni­za­tions. Although we think that this list of issues is, by itself, a use­ful resource for assist­ing IT man­agers steer­ing the orga­ni­za­tion towards the adop­tion of CC, we advo­cate tak­ing a fur­ther step, namely sub­mit­ting the list to the scrutiny of pro­fes­sion­als that under­took a suc­cess­ful migra­tion to CC. The prac­ti­cal view held by such indi­vid­u­als would con­trib­ute to a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the issues in con­text. On the one hand, it could elu­ci­date whether the list cap­tures the per­spec­tive of the prac­ti­tion­ers. On the other hand, it could pro­vide indi­ca­tions on the rel­a­tive impor­tance of each issue, unveil­ing some order of pri­or­ity between them, with cer­tain issues being more impor­tant than oth­ers in the process of adopt­ing CC.

3. Interviews

In order to obtain the views of the prac­ti­tion­ers on the list of issues, inter­views were con­ducted with experts of IT Cloud enter­prises that migrated to cloud and that pro­vide SaaS (Soft­ware as a Ser­vice) ser­vices to their cus­tomers. The pro­fes­sion­als inter­viewed were tech­ni­cal direc­tors of enter­prises that have expe­ri­enced the deci­sion process of adopt­ing CC in their com­pa­nies and that actively par­tic­i­pated in its imple­men­ta­tion.

To direct the con­ver­sa­tion, an inter­view guide com­posed of seven groups of ques­tions was pre­pared, accord­ing to the rec­om­men­da­tions of Myers and New­man [2007]. The struc­ture of the guide is described in Table 3. The first stage of the inter­view prompted a gen­eral, unre­stricted answer from the inter­vie­wee on the rel­e­vant issues in the migra­tion process to Cloud. Stages 2 to 6 of the inter­view (cf. Table 3) focused the con­ver­sa­tion on the cat­e­gories in which the issues com­piled dur­ing the lit­er­a­ture review were orga­nized. The final stage of the inter­view included an open ques­tion so that the respon­dent could add some­thing he/she judged rel­e­vant on the sub­ject addressed and con­sid­er­ing the dia­logue con­structed through­out the con­ver­sa­tion.

Table 3: Inter­view Ques­tions

The experts that could par­tic­i­pate in the inter­views were based in Sala­manca, Spain, and were con­tacted by tele­phone. Seven direc­tors of IT enter­prises were invited, four of these accepted to grant an inter­view for this research. The process of select­ing the pool of respon­dents was sup­ported by a pre­vi­ous sur­vey of poten­tial experts to be inter­viewed. The sur­vey included four ques­tions about the char­ac­ter­is­tics of their orga­ni­za­tions (type of com­pany and com­pany data, such as num­ber of employ­ees, struc­ture, etc.) and the experts (posi­tion and expe­ri­ence). The main fea­tures of the respon­dents are shown in Table 4.

Table 4: Char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of Inter­vie­wees

Method­olog­i­cally, semi-struc­tured inter­views were used to cap­ture the experts’ opin­ions. Inter­view A took 90 min­utes, B 65 min­utes; C 85 min­utes, and D 60 min­utes. Respon­dents were informed about anonymity of par­tic­i­pa­tion and were asked per­mis­sion for the inter­views to be audio recorded (all inter­vie­wees granted per­mis­sion).

The inter­views were then tran­scribed and coded fol­low­ing a mode of analy­sis based on grounded the­ory. In the first step of the cod­ing process, 67 codes were cre­ated. Sub­se­quently, the codes were orga­nized into 13 fam­i­lies of com­mon sub­jects, as shown in Table 5. These fam­i­lies of codes helped us to clar­ify and con­trast the respon­dents’ con­tri­bu­tions and to relate back their views to the five cat­e­gories of CC issues derived from the lit­er­a­ture review.

Table 5: Codes in Inter­view Analy­sis

4. Findings

The con­tent of the inter­views was ana­lyzed to detect com­mon pat­terns and dis­sim­i­lar­i­ties between experts. A sum­mary of the find­ings is pre­sented in Table 6. This table is based on the com­piled list of issues that resulted from the lit­er­a­ture review (cf. Table 2). The inter­vie­wees made impor­tant con­tri­bu­tions to the clar­i­fi­ca­tion of the issues com­piled dur­ing the review of the lit­er­a­ture, namely by explain­ing the prob­lems they faced, describ­ing how they mit­i­gated risks and over­came obsta­cles, and report­ing the sit­u­a­tions they expe­ri­enced. In Table 6 we denote with a bul­let the issues which the inter­vie­wees’ stressed as more rel­e­vant in their processes of adopt­ing CC. Col­umn “Con­sen­sus” indi­cates the issues that have gath­ered con­sen­sus among all inter­vie­wees (issues marked with ×).

Table 6: Find­ings in Inter­views

The inter­vie­wees con­firmed all the cat­e­gories in which the com­piled issues were orga­nized into and pro­vided rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion that clar­ify the role of each issue.

5. Discussion

Through the col­lec­tion of the views of pro­fes­sion­als that had been engaged in the migra­tion process to CC, this study aimed to clar­ify if the list of issues com­piled from the lit­er­a­ture review con­veys the per­spec­tive of poten­tial cloud plat­form cus­tomers. The analy­sis of the data col­lected in the inter­views con­firms an impor­tant premise about the adop­tion of CC already sug­gested in the lit­er­a­ture review: when adopt­ing CC ser­vices, orga­ni­za­tions should analyse the risks involved, the ben­e­fits and the advan­tages of CC, adjust their pre­pared­ness (matu­rity) level, choose the CC provider care­fully, and pre­pare a con­tract that safe­guards their inter­ests.

The results of this study also reveal that the list of issues com­piled by the authors reflects the con­cerns of the experts inter­viewed. Table 7 lists these most rel­e­vant issue’s cat­e­gories in order of con­sen­sus aver­age (num­ber of con­sen­sual issues divided by the total num­ber of issues pro­posed in the cat­e­gory).

Table 7: Most Impor­tant Issues Cat­e­gory

The pro­fes­sion­als also con­trib­uted with rel­e­vant clar­i­fi­ca­tions about those issues through the tes­ti­mony based on their expe­ri­ence. We also took advan­tage of the oppor­tu­nity pro­vided by the inter­views to find out if experts con­sid­ered some order of impor­tance among the cat­e­gories of issues, i.e., if some cat­e­gories include more rel­e­vant issues and thus deserve more atten­tion by IT man­agers in com­par­i­son to oth­ers. Accord­ing to the inter­vie­wees, there are indeed dif­fer­ent lev­els of impor­tance that must be assigned to the cat­e­gories of issues, as sug­gested by Table 7.

To some extent, this may be con­cep­tu­al­ized as a set of crit­i­cal suc­cess fac­tors for the adop­tion of CC. Although all cat­e­gories of issues are rel­e­vant for the adop­tion of CC, there is a group of issues that attract a higher level of con­cern of prac­ti­tion­ers and that have a stronger impact on the path to a suc­cess­ful imple­men­ta­tion of CC ser­vices by orga­ni­za­tions. Indeed, the con­sen­sual issues may form the core issues that every orga­ni­za­tion should take into con­sid­er­a­tion, in each of the five major cat­e­gories of issues. For those issues which the analy­sis of the inter­views’ con­tri­bu­tions did not sug­gest an equal impor­tant con­cern among the responds, man­agers con­duct­ing a CC adop­tion deci­sion process should con­sider them as con­tex­tual. These con­tex­tual issues may be more rel­e­vant to cer­tain orga­ni­za­tions than to oth­ers.

6. Limitations and Directions for Future Studies

Some of the lim­i­ta­tions of this study derive from its research in progress nature: the work was restricted to the region of Castilla y Leon, Spain, and so far we have just inter­viewed four experts of IT enter­prises, although with sub­stan­tial expe­ri­ence in CC mat­ters.

To fur­ther test, and even­tu­ally gen­er­al­ize, the (work­ing) con­clu­sions advanced in this paper, we intend to con­duct inter­views with respon­dents whose orga­ni­za­tions oper­ate in dif­fer­ent set­tings, such as in dif­fer­ent coun­tries, regions, or mar­kets. An impor­tant goal of these future stud­ies is to check if the ten­ta­tive set of crit­i­cal fac­tors for the suc­cess­ful adop­tion of CC holds for a broad base of orga­ni­za­tions.

A sub­se­quent future work will be the devel­op­ment of an instru­ment to assist IT man­agers eval­u­at­ing the key issues that influ­ence the migra­tion process to Cloud by orga­ni­za­tions. The exis­tence of a set of crit­i­cal suc­cess fac­tors with a direct impact on the adop­tion of CC may sub­stan­tially increase the effec­tive­ness of that instru­ment.

Acknowledgment

This work has been sup­ported by COM­PETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT–Fun­dação para a Ciên­cia e Tec­nolo­gia within the Pro­ject Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013.

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