Cloud Adoption: Relative Advantage or IT Fashion?

Cloud computing is a recent trend that has transformed the IS resource provisioning industry. However, the hype that cloud computing has received lately in combination with the ‘must-deploy’ imperative usually used by its promoters, makes it easy for decision makers to lose track of the reasons that make cloud computing valuable to business. At the same time, the IS research community has focused on addressing the factors that affect cloud adoption, paying little attention to the impact of external factors. Reviewing earlier work on diffusion of innovation theory and based on a preliminary qualitative research, we note that a main driver for cloud adoption is a set of factors that mark its relative advantage compared to earlier provisioning service models. Taking into account our interview data and fashion management theory, we extend earlier research work by introducing the tendency of organizations to follow IT fashion as a reason that also influences cloud computing adoption. We therefore propose a research model that takes into account both relative advantage and fashion drivers for cloud adoption and we discuss further steps and control dimensions for empirically testing this model in future work.