Abstract
The rapid adoption of cloud computing by organizations, along with the need to comply with relevant IT governance (ITG) controls, has increased the complexity of governance in the cloud. This transition from a classical data center to a virtualized data center has resulted in the reallocation of roles and responsibilities of IT personnel for managing and accounting for the relevant IT controls. With a lack of guidelines or model for practitioners to choose from, with regard to the allocation of roles and responsibilities, there is a lack of clarity on the responsibilities and accountability for these IT controls. The purpose of this paper is to propose a theoretical model for assigning roles and responsibilities for IT controls for an organization operating in a cloud environment. The proposed model is based on a strong theoretical grounding and can be used to inform good practice.
Highlights
T he rapid adoption of cloud computing, through aligning of core IT competencies and putting technology where it belongs, are two out of the seven indisputable trends that will define 2015 (Andriole, 2012)
With cloud computing becoming a rapidly growing market (Repschlaeger et al, 2012), there is a need to explore this further through the research question, What is the criteria for allocating roles and responsibilities of IT controls in a cloud environment?
It has been argued that the value of the tasks and the availability of human capital capabilities will define the selection of cloud solutions to complement the business strategy and decision whether to allocate internal or external human resource to these complex IT controls (Arthur, 1992; Snell & Dean, 1992)
Summary
T he rapid adoption of cloud computing, through aligning of core IT competencies and putting technology where it belongs, are two out of the seven indisputable trends that will define 2015 (Andriole, 2012). Migration of an organizations’ IT functions to clouds produces challenges, especially in relation to the changing role and responsibilities of the personnel concerned with the governance of the relevant IT controls. The IT department is the department that is normally entrusted with the responsibility for the project of migrating relevant services/models to the cloud environment (Repschlaeger, Zarnekow, Wind, & Klaus, 2012). When this restructuring happens, there is a corresponding restructuring of roles and responsibilities relating to changed internal IT controls in the new environment. With hardly any guidance available to IT practitioners from the academic as well as the non-academic forum, such cloud migration projects are fraught with challenges (Rashmi & Sahoo, 2012)
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