Cloud Computing Adoption: A Literature Review on What Is New and What We Still Need to Address

Research on cloud computing (CC) recently emerged congruently with the technology’s importance for organizations at a fast pace. This makes it difficult for practitioners to obtain a consolidated overview of what determines CC adoption based on the numerous papers in this regard. Moreover, for further research in the field to add value, it is necessary to identify what still needs to be addressed. In this vein, we conducted a descriptive review of 39 papers, integrating the results of a previous review on 23 papers from 2014, to compare findings across studies. We identify 44 determinant factors that exhibit consistent directional influence on the dependent meta-variable “CC adoption”, extending previous literature reviews with regard to asset, client, and environmental characteristics. We then critically reviewed the research landscape to identify what is there, and what is not yet covered: Future research should specifically regard the adoption of Infrastructure-, Platform-, and Everything-as-a-Service, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud deployment, investigate vendor, solution, and individual characteristics, analyzing information systems, or the decision-maker