Assessment of cloud computing readiness of financial institutions in South Africa

Cloud Computing (CC) is becoming popular among organisations from different industries in South Africa (SA) because of its promises such as cost reduction, on demand self-service, broad access network, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, measured service, little or no set up capital and faster time to market. As a result, many organisations are already in the early stages of their CC implementation while others are planning to adopt CC. Although CC promises many benefits, it is equally important to note that there are some barriers to its adoption which needs to be considered before adoption in order to ensure implementation success. Proper understanding of these barriers and coming up with ways to mitigate them will improve the CC readiness level of organisations. Among the various industry sectors, the financial industry in SA has been one of the early adopters of CC but they have not fully implemented it because of barriers such as security and privacy (Vignos, Kim, & Metzer, 2013), governance issues, inadequate cloud service level agreements (SLAs), vendor lock in, poor vendor transparency, inability to assess risks, confidentiality, integrity and availability. Because CC is relatively new and is still in its early stages, not much work has been done to inform organisations about the barriers and enablers of CC. Available guidelines to help organisations improve their CC readiness level are also inadequate. This is risky for financial institutions that deal with sensitive customer information as the safety of that information is not guaranteed if a desired readiness level is not attained before implementation.

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Department of Information Systems

Year dc:date.issued

2014

Author dc:creator

• Akande, Akinlolu Olumide

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Van Belle, Jean-Paul

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/11427/8503

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/8503