Modelling Organisational Resilience in the Cloud

Cloud computing (CC) is a promising information and communication technologies (ICT) services delivery model that has already had a significant impact on Government agencies, small and medium enterprises and large organisations. Even though its adoption is moving from the early stage to mainstream, many organisations are still afraid that their resilience might deteriorate because of the additional levels of abstraction that CC introduces. This additional complexity makes the assessment of ICT operational resilience more difficult and no consensus exists of such analysis. Following a multi-method approach, this research proposal first extends prior research in the field, looking at new possible categories of resilience-oriented requirements when working in CC environments. Based on the results, this research will propose a conceptual model that helps organisations to maintain and improve Organisational Resilience (OR) when working in CC environments, from the ICT operational perspective. Particularly, as a lack of coordination has been identified as one of the main problems when facing disruptive incidents, using coordination theory, this research will identify the fundamental coordination processes involved in the proposed model. The results of this research should be of interest to academic researchers and practitioners.