Conclusion

Evaluate resource availability to determine the usefulness of cloud solution, mitigate incongruence between IT and business goals, combat inertia

Competence Internal and external IT expertise

Exploit experiential learning and absorptive capacity, effectively disseminate best practices, motivate employees, and manage talent

Transaction costs

Unanticipated costs occurring in cloud transition

Locate hidden costs potential areas of financial loss, mitigate operational and transactional risk, relational governance

Technology Cloud computing solutions

Awareness of security and IT service cost, assess compatibility issues, quality of existing systems, inclination to adopt cloud

The objectives of this thesis were to assess critical success factors for organizations transitioning to cloud-based solutions and delineate the benefits of exploiting those solutions. Hence the two related research questions guided the qualitative study. Gathered knowledge was compared to existing literature to

understand today's situation in light of the massive evolution of cloud computing technology further spurred by the pandemic. An enormous amount of data emerged, and the most critical were grouped under four Critical success factors: readiness, competence, transaction costs, and technology. Readiness included business, culture, and cloud dimensions. Business readiness encompassed the need to assess outsourcing motivation, business needs, and the importance of having a digitalization strategy. Culture readiness entailed shifting ITs function, adaptation, motivation, and commitment to combat organizational inertia. Cloud readiness related to business process management, expectations, and governance's paramount importance.

Competence diverged into internal and external aspects. The former included management, expertise, organizational alignment, collaboration, and knowledge sharing to gain cloud knowledge and address the market's current lack of knowledge. The latter encompassed external partner's involvement in adopting best practices, continuously optimizing business processes, enabling advantageous exploitation, and exploring the business climate necessary to retain and develop knowledge.

Transaction costs are an integrated part of any outsourcing initiative. So acquiring the right expertise in a cloud setting and auditing costs were inherent to mitigate costs. Acceptance, adaptation of services to exploit cloud infrastructure would alleviate the vendor lock-in effect. Furthermore, organizations needed to trust the technology, partners, and IT capabilities to mitigate uncertainty. Organizations engaging in relational governance and assessing their providers appropriately would have a higher probability of attaining a successful cloud journey. However, externalities such as regulations and other contextual factors might affect organizations differently.

Technology was critical as it enabled the organization to modernize its business functions by reallocating capabilities if they were ready to assume the tradeoffs. Moreover, it was vital to assess the notion of the black box of innovation to mitigate technology lags caused by legacy systems, construct cloud solutions for resiliency, and secure business continuity. Lastly, organizations needed to assume the shared security responsibility model, nurture a mindful approach to security knowledge, and instore mitigation measures to create proper cloud capabilities to secure a successful transition. Consequently, benefits would arise.

Table 5-1 Benefits

Benefits Implications

Strategic Speed, agility, Business process re-engineering, focus on core competency, competitive advantage, innovation capabilities

Organizational

Usability, ease of use, data-driven decision making, collaboration, knowledge sharing, leaner business processes, leadership, transparency, effectiveness, resource savings, customer feedback exploitation

Technological Eliminate hardware, system upgrade and functionalities, optimization, enhanced customer experiences, limited failures

Economical Planning, compliance, no apparent money savings, the cloud is more expensive,

Through critical success factors, organizations would reap the benefits of the cloud. Even though these categories were separated, they overlapped and interacted. With the proper plan and competence, economic gains occurred. But in general, cloud solutions would require more investment than marketing messages promoted. However, the most considerable advantages came from strategic synergies created by automating and continuously optimizing organizational processes, adopting best practices, engaging in corporate learning, and exploiting the technology. Thus, developing innovation capabilities to secure competitive advantages and thrive in a dynamic business ecosystem characterized by a high degree of uncertainty.

It required organizations to adopt an agile mindset and collaborate with their environment to create value.

The days of protectionist measures are losing ground to the more cooperative and ever-changing ecosystems spurred by the fourth industrial revolution. Organizations ready to align strategic goals with their needs, human resources, and capabilities, put in place governance structures to continuously learn, adapt, and optimize will succeed in transitioning to the cloud.

Organizations must grasp the critical importance of their behavior when operating in a cloud environment.

Assess their size, purpose, and skills to determine who they are as a company.

How does it view its employees? How is cloud relevant to the market it operates in? Is the organization starting from scratch in the cloud? Migrating data into the cloud? Or buying a SaaS where they know what they get up front?

The answer to these questions will determine the amount of cloud resources needed, the appropriate provider, service, and deployment model.

Moreover, organizations need to stop doing manual, tedious tasks internally. Using cloud services might alleviate these concerns. However, organizations need to control their data before making the transition to the cloud to benefit after the change. Several factors need to be satisfied to enable a prosperous cloud journey.

Commitment is vital at various levels. There needs to be strategic information technology alignment between business and IT to ensure the C-suite moves in the same direction. Furthermore, all departments in the organization who touch upon the customer must cooperate. Thus, benefitting from the cloud as they all have the same customer view.

Moreover, organizations must adopt a plan considering governance and security materialized in an endless cycle encompassing readiness, governance, and continuous optimization.

Organizations achieve this and gain control by having a team of proper expertise internally and externally.

Without appropriate expertise, factors related to bandwidth, security, long-term development of technology, settings, control, and access could slip under the radar. Moreover, it is critical to audit processes and

reallocates capabilities to optimize for the cloud during and after the transition, especially regarding costs.

Furthermore, organizations need to exploit cloud services by building more or less standardized IT services to deliver them faster and better, especially in light of the bottom architecture of the cloud being the same with only the services on top differing. The different components' approaches are different, but the

components are the same. Organizations need to think of the cloud as building blocks and integrate a more system thinking approach to understand the workloads. Optimizing them for the cloud by building resilient services addresses downtime issues, especially for legacy systems.

Knowledge of the extreme power of the cloud enables organizations to unlock benefits.

Speed of change and business innovation has disrupted business, demonstrating the advantages of the cloud.

Cloud is an enabler to fix business problems with its immense scalability. Cloud providers permit upgrades enabling leaner business processes. The technology allows organizations to be more effective with fewer resources. Moreover, cloud solutions enable tracking progress and developing novel working methods.

Thus, promoting transparency and better decision-making. In addition, technology plays a crucial role in talent management in making it easier to retain or discard resources.

Transitioning to the cloud is a continuous journey implying a shift in risk assessment and loss of control. Its business models enable a new way of working, which organizations cannot control. Organizations should relinquish this obsolete thinking and nurture trust by cementing a healthy relationship with a provider.

Choosing the provider becomes inherent as it is challenging to acquire the right expertise. Asking for proof of concepts and looking for partnering relationships to seek long-term value delivery creation is a good starting point. Organizations should choose a cloud service provider with a proven track record that does not have a cynical approach to business and wants to give back to society.

Also, organizations need to understand that they get much help from managed service providers instead of going to the public cloud on their own, especially for those lacking appropriate expertise.

Accept the lock-in effect, assess providers accordingly and understand that are the big cloud service providers possess superior security capabilities.

There are misconceptions about the cloud paradigm that have endured for a long time that organizations would be wise to remember. Technology helps organizations, but organizations are afraid of changes induced by technology.

Moreover, organizations need to be aware of cloud natives organizations versus fakes cloud companies. It is hard to discern as it is not public knowledge, emphasizing the importance of assessment internally and externally in establishing strategic partnerships.

The pay-for-what you use is a genius model, but maybe what you use should be redefined, or its meaning and function interpreted correctly by organizations.

Customers don't care if systems running in the background are on-premise or in the cloud as long as the business problem is solved. Maybe that is another problem. If organizations cared more, there would be more ownership. Again organizations need to adopt a mindful approach to the cloud and acknowledge the consequences of actions in the cloud. It is especially relevant to security, where it is not about preventing a security breach but preparing for the inevitable attack.

Hence organizations need to think about their motivation for going cloud. Organizations have different needs, different features, and functions. NRK hosting Eurovision song contest and Skatteetaten making tax returns available is not the same as implementing SAP cloud ERP in a corporation. Finn.no needing

immense speed capabilities differs from Cloudguru tailoring their platform to the Amazon infrastructure and price mechanisms. So choosing the right provider is critical. But mainly, organizations need to understand their business value proposition and how cloud technology can combine with people and processes to create added value.