The business perspective of cloud computing adoption: evidence from Greece

During the last few years, the business Information Technology community and academia have attempted to approach the new paradigm of Cloud Computing. They have investigated the phenomenon in terms of ontology, origin, technical specifications and business value. While the research roadmap for Cloud Computing has not yet been coherently defined, the need to widely understand and study its business aspect is more prominent than before. As this new shift in computing continues to mature and grow, we take the opportunity to locate and analyse the different issues that arise from the perspective of the potential software–as–a–service (SaaS) and cloud business customer. In this paper, evidence from the industry's decision–makers in the Greek business IT community is examined, to identify and rank the motivational and inhibitory factors, as well as investigate the associated business issues in an attempt to correlate theory with practice.