Empirical Findings
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benefit from deployed cloud services (Faltus, 2013) & (Schweighofer, 2013) &
(
Seher, 2013) & (Höllwarth, 2013) & (Vormwald, 2013). Hence a company is
demanded to sort out possible “island solutions” in their integrated systems and to
establish a homogenous “big picture”, which is ready to fulfill the technical
requirements of cloud services (Seher, 2013). On a strategic level, a company
needs a clearly defined and communicated cloud strategy with cloud policies. A
business case should reveal all strategic opportunities, threats and requirements
towards cloud services. A good point to start with this is a proof of concepts
(
Höllwarth, 2013).
As soon as a company meets the prerequisites, the potential benefits of cloud
services are unfolded: Flexibility, accessibility, availability, mobility, planning
Certainty, cost-saving aspects, Big Data opportunities, new market opportunities,
free resources in the company, as well as enhanced performance in terms of
computing power (Faltus, 2013) & (Höllwarth, 2013) & (Schweighofer, 2013) &
(
Seher, 2013) & (Vormwald, 2013).
However potential pitfalls and threats still remain and also need to be taken into
consideration. Particularly the “vendor lock-in” can become a pitfall, if companies do
not have a cloud exit strategy (Seher, 2013). The experts mutually agree upon the
loss of autonomy of data to a certain degree, but on the other hand also say that on-
premise datacenters are not “silos” and thus can be subject to intrusion, hacking,
malfunction or other potential security threats as well (Seher, 2013) & (Höllwarth,
2013) & (
Schweighofer, 2013) & (Faltus, 2013) & (Vormwald, 2013).
Summarized it can be said that the experts opinion towards cloud services is mostly
positive. Irrespectively from the industry a company acts in, it can derive a potential
benefit from the employment of cloud services, if they are based on strategic
decisions, clearly defined objectives, efficient project and change management,
compliance with regulations, as well as the willingness to adapt a new technology.
Faltus (2013) says that cloud services will soon lose the nimbus of risk and danger
and become a “commodity”, as it has been the case with many new technologies.
A couple of years ago smartphones were spectacular new devices, that
revolutionized the mobile phone market. A few years later the novelty status is gone
