| Cloud computing may provide cost benefits for organizations by eliminating the overhead costs of software, hardware, and maintenance (e.g., license renewals, upgrading software, servers and their physical storage space, administration along with funding a large IT department). In addition to the promised savings, the organization may require additional security mechanisms to ensure government/regulatory compliance. In making the business decision to adopt cloud computing, the organization may want to ensure various security measures are in place to minimize their risk of data theft, fines, and privacy. The purpose of the study is to describe certain variables of adopting cloud computing, and to compare their security concerns with adoption. The non-experimental quantitative approach is selected to analyze the factors that impact the adoption of cloud computing. The study extends the technology acceptance model (TAM) to measure organization's acceptance and use (adoption) of cloud computing based on the organization type, cloud certification, and security concern. This research study is based on the security themes from the IBM information security capability reference model to help identify the key security areas. The target population for the study consists of information security managers in various organizations throughout the United States. Based on the organization type, one can conclude there is not a significant relationship between the adoption of cloud computing and organization types. From the ordinal logistic regression, there was a significant relationship among cloud adoption, the transportation organization type, cloud security certification, perceived usefulness, and perceived ease of use. Overall, more than half of the respondents would feel more secure in adopting cloud computing with cloud providers possessing a cloud security certificate. There failed to be enough data to support a significant correlation between the security themes and the adoptions of cloud computing. In combining all of the participants' responses, the following three security themes appeared in the top ranking as being a concern: transaction and data integrity, identity and access management, and privacy. |
