Cloud Impact on IT Governance

Abstract

Today’s competitive environment pushes technology into changing quickly, which hence triggers organizations to be ready for such changes. Cloud computing is one of the popular evolving information technologies that seems to affect organizations in different ways, and on different levels. The academic as well as the professional literature focused on identifying the several pros and cons of adopting cloud solutions. However, the related work does not clearly identify how adopting such solutions affects the organization’s IT governance, where implementing effective IT governance is required in order to survive in a competitive market. Therefore, the aim of this research paper is to study the effect cloud solutions have on organizations’ IT governance. We first built this paper through an exhaustive literature review stating the cloud computing boosters and inhibitors, along with the organizational transformations cited by several researchers. Then, in order to validate these transformations and the effects brought by the cloud, we conducted a set of twenty interviews with professionals (CIOs, CEOs, and project managers) from large organizations in France. Our findings endorse the most common elements found in the literature regarding the important considerations when adopting the cloud (security, reversibility, interoperability, etc.) New findings have also been highlighted in our data analysis; cloud computing seems to affect the technological and strategical aspects of IT governance, as well as the business transformation.