Critical success factors of adoption to a (SaaS) public cloud.
Joshua Paffen, Nick Vinju · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2020
With digital transformation becoming more important, companies are switching more often to Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions. However the advent of cloud computing is having an increasing impact on enterprise IT architecture and how the components of the governance process is executed. Many companies tend to simply assume that moving IT systems to the cloud will directly yield benefits provided by the cloud infrastructure and systems. However, this approach can often result in more complex and costly IT architectures. While the value of switching to a cloud strategy has to be maximized. What is needed, is to identify the impact and key success factors of the adoption of SaaS and how to use these to successfully adopt to SaaS. In order to identify this, this thesis master document will provide an overview of a general set of critical success factors for cloud adoption from an overall, governance and architecture point of view. This is based on a literature review as a research methodology. Critical success factors were identified in already existing literature, these where then verified with several industry experts. To cover all aspects of the validation by industry experts with regards to cloud SaaS and get observations from different angles, three targets groups have been selected; Cloud customer, cloud supplier and cloud broker. Research has been done from an architecture perspective, to determine whether the reviewed enterprise architecture frameworks such as Zachman (1987), The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) (Harrison 2011), Dynamic Architecture (DYA) (Jumelet, 2009) and the adaptive enterprise architecture framework (Gill, 2015) can be used to develop adaptive enterprise architecture for cloud adoption. Moreover how these can support the critical success factors. From a governance perspective research and comparison of most popular governance frameworks and standards such COBIT, COSO, ITIL, ISO 27000, ISAE 3402 and CCM have been done. In different countries all over the world research has been done into identifying the critical success factors of cloud adoptions in the past. Articles about these studies have been collected and several critical success factors were identified. Namely information Security, data Security, cost, relative advantage, complexity, compatibility, trialability, top management support, technological readiness, firm size, IT managers support, service level agreements and monitoring, regulatory environment, service providers support, perceived industry pressure. Based on the overall results of the interviews with the industry experts it can be concluded that in general they are in agreement on what is important and what is not. From an architecture and governance point of view for the broker, provider as well as the customer, data security and information security are of high importance. However these two factors also have one of the highest difference in valuation amongst these groups. Therefore, these factors need extra attention in order to ensure expectations are aligned. In general it can be concluded from the overall findings that almost all critical success factors found in literature have importance except perceived industry pressure.