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Topic: The adoption of cloud computing services is influenced by many issues perceived differently by clients and cloud service providers; providers may see the positive side of the cloud, whereas clients may perceive it otherwise. This report presents the results of a Delphi study and focuses on the following two questions: What issues confront enterprises when adopting cloud computing services? What is the relative importance of these issues?
Method: Thirty-four experts from different industries and public institutions participated in a Delphi panel. It was divided into three subpanels that represent different stakeholders, namely, clients, providers, and academics. We started the study in 2013 and completed it in March 2015. The Delphi study procedure comprised three stages, namely, (1) brainstorming, (2) narrowing down, and (3) ranking. Follow-up interviews were also conducted to gain an in-depth understanding of the topics examined.
Findings: The panelists identified 55 issues of concern in the first round, and these were analyzed and grouped into 10 categories: (1) security, (2) availability, (3) migration, (4) business, (5) legal and ethical concerns, (6) culture, (7) awareness, (8) impact, (9) strategy, and (10) IT governance. In the second round, most of the panelists’ votes went to security (104 votes), followed by legal and ethical (67 votes), impact (60 votes), and strategy (54 votes) issues. In the narrowing down phase, 33 issues were identified, and these were based on a threshold of 30%. In the first ranking round, 33 issues were ranked by the panelists. However, we could not reach an acceptable agreement (Kendall W was for clients=0.173, providers=0.069, and academics=0.270). In the second round of ranking, the top 18 issues of each subpanel were ranked, and the intrapanel agreement showed moderate consensus on the issues (Kendall W was for clients=0.392, providers=0.443, and academics=0.493). We found that the client panel ranked the issue “Data protection legislations are different and not strong in all countries” as number one, the provider panel ranked the issue “The risk of losing control over resources (data, software, hardware, and human resources) in private clouds is less than that in public clouds. However, risks are not absolute, and most of them can be addressed, but not all of them” as number one, and the academic panel ranked the issue “Enterprises are faced with weak undetailed Service Level Agreements (SLAs) from providers (e.g., providers may not be transparent about where and how do they store the data and the acknowledgement of security incidents whenever happen and how the cloud provider deals with it)” as number one. Follow-up interviews were also conducted. The insights of the panelists are shared in this report.
Conclusions: The report highlights current cloud computing adoption issues. Security, strategy, legal and ethical concerns, and IT governance were among the highest-ranked issues by the participants in the study. The results show different perspectives across the subpanels, especially for the clients and providers. Clients need to understand well their business needs and what value cloud computing can add to their business. Cloud service providers need to fully comprehend the current needs of their market. More work needs to be done on increasing awareness regarding cloud computing and its benefits for businesses. Clients are particularly interested in hearing more about hybrid cloud solutions. The most important issues of concern are further discussed in this report.
