Cloud adoption challenges : what are the primary challenges for organisations when conducting cloud adoption projects?

Cloud computing is an economic and operational model which has become mainstream and is growing every year. Besides providing an opportunity to control costs, the main reasons for companies adopting the cloud are to gain speed and agility. Organisations globally are increasingly moving to the cloud and initiating projects to manage this technological change. This leads to the research question: “What are the primary challenges for organisations when conducting cloud adoption projects?”. The literature review defines cloud computing before examining the topics of change management and, more specifically, cloud adoption projects. Four IT professionals with experience of cloud adoption projects were interviewed for this research. The main finding is that cloud adoption projects face three main challenges: the intrinsically highly transformational nature of cloud adoption itself and the associated disruptive nature of such transformations, the requirement for a baseline of organisational maturity, and the human factor - the psychology of fear and resistance when faced with a particularly unfamiliar and abstract change driver such as represented by cloud computing