Cloud Impact on IT Governance

Today's competitive environment pushes technology into changing quickly, hence triggering 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 promoters and inhibitors for 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 of cloud solutions on organizations' IT governance. We first built this paper through an exhaustive literature review describing the various cloud computing promoters 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.