Towards An Understanding of Cloud Computing's Impact On Organizational IT Strategy

Cloud computing has become a dominant IT trend during the past two years for its potential to remarkably change the technology and business landscape. Although a lot have been discussed, its impacts on organizational IT strategy have not yet been fully addressed. In order to learn how cloud computing is going to bring changes to organizational IT strategy, we conducted interviews with CIOs/IT directors from US companies which has adopted the cloud service to understand the potential impacts. Grounded theory approach is used in this study and a model is generated based on qualitative analysis. Our findings reveals that, cloud computing has profound impacts on various aspects of organizational IT strategy: including IT architecture, IT management, Data strategy, and IT/ business alignment. Given the trend that more and more organizations are going to embrace the cloud, the model generated in this work will have great practical implications for organizations.