Introduction

Abstract

During the last several decades, a majority of companies, governments, and nonprofit organizations have outsourced at least part of their information systems (ISs) to external suppliers. Cloud Computing (the Cloud) represents an advancement of classical information technology (IT) outsourcing (ITO) by means of modern communication technologies. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines the Cloud as “a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction” (Mell and Grance 2011, p. 2). Although the Cloud promises a variety of technical and economic advantages over classical ITO concepts (e.g., Marston et al. 2011), its acceptance lags far behind the expectations.