Internet of Things 15 (2021) 100407
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Internet of Things
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/iot
Review article
A Systematic Review of Organizational Factors Impacting
Cloud-based Technology Adoption Using
Technology-Organization-Environment Framework
Ali Al Hadwer
a
, Madjid Tavana
b,c,1,*
, Dan Gillis
d
, Davar Rezania
e
a
College of Public Health and Health Informatics, King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
b
Business Systems and Analytics Department, Distinguished Chair of Business Analytics, La Salle University, Philadelphia, PA 19141, USA
c
Business Information Systems Department, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, University of Paderborn, D-33098
Paderborn, Germany
d
School of Computer Science, University of Guelph, Guelph, Canada
e
College of Business and Economics, University of Guelph, Guelph, Canada
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Received 13 April 2021
Revised 8 May 2021
Accepted 9 May 2021
Available online 24 May 2021
Keywords:
cloud computing
technology adoption
organizational factors
systematic review
technology-organization-environment
a b s t r a c t
Cloud computing services such as file storage and big data analytics offer cost-effective,
secure, flexible, and sustainable services to their users. Despite their benefits, the adop-
tion of many cloud services is still limited, and many organizations are hesitant to adopt
cloud technologies for several reasons. Researchers have used innovation adoption theo-
ries to explore the factors influencing users’ decisions toward accepting and using a new
information system. This study presents a systematic review of the factors influencing or-
ganizational decisions concerning the acceptance of cloud-based technologies using the
technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework. We analyze, integrate, and classify
these factors and show that much of the literature has emphasized the technical aspects
of technology adoption, such as cloud security. We further show factors like top manage-
ment support, relative advantage, cloud complexity, and competitive pressure are the most
critical factors affecting organizational attitude toward cloud technology adoption.
© 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines cloud computing as “a model for enabling convenient,
on demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., network, servers, storage, applications
and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction”
[24]. The NIST definition reveals the main advantages of cloud computing, shareability, scalability, and cost reduction. It also
reveals some disadvantages associated with using cloud computing, like access control and resource ownership. For example,
clients become unable to migrate their data from a cloud service provider to another due to a lack of standards (Ali et al.,
2019). As a result, cloud computing usage is accelerating among individual and organizational users, and its market size is
*
Corresponding author at: Business Systems and Analytics Department, Distinguished Chair of Business Systems and Analytics, La Salle University,
Philadelphia, PA 19141, United States.
E-mail addresses: hadwera@ksau-hs.edu.sa (A. Al Hadwer), tavana@lasalle.edu (M. Tavana), dgillis@uoguelph.ca (D. Gillis), drezania@uoguelph.ca (D.
Rezania).
1
Web: http://tavana.us/
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iot.2021.100407
2542-6605/© 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.