Towards An Understanding of Cloud Computing's Impact on Organizational it Strategy

Cloud computing has become a dominant IT trend during the past two years for its potential to remarkably change the technology and the business landscape. Although a lot have been discussed regarding its benefits and risks, and cloud strategy itself has been widely studied in the business world, its strategic impacts have not yet been fully addressed. In order to understand how cloud computing is going to bring changes to the overall IT strategy of the organization, we conducted interviews with CIOs/IT directors from 4 US companies which have adopted cloud computing services to understand such impacts. Grounded theory approach was used in this study and a model was generated based on qualitative analysis. Our findings reveals that, cloud computing has profound impacts on various aspects of organization's overall IT strategy: including IT architecture, IT management, data strategy, and IT/ business alignment. Given the trend that more and more organizations are going to embrace cloud computing, the model and findings of this research would have great both research implications for future investigators as well as practical implications for organizations.