The Cloud-Based Demand-Driven Supply Chain

CHAPTER 6Summary

Cloud computing has had an evolutionary path, and while there is still room for growth and adoption by organizations and industries worldwide, it is becoming a de facto standard and information technology (IT) operating model. Some organizations are more cautious when it comes to change and adopting new technologies, and this is mainly driven by the type of industry and geographic location they operate in. Large organizations see the risks of security breaches, the location of data, and uncertainty of jurisdiction and resolution mechanisms as the greatest reasons for not using cloud computing (Wauters et al. 2016, 41–45). Legal rules, which can be industry‐specific or region‐specific such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming into effect in May 2018, and an organization's level of risk averseness are two other important influencing factors as to whether cloud computing (i.e., public cloud) is leveraged.

There were similar pushback reasons at the initial onset of cloud computing when virtualization of x86 hardware became popular more than a decade ago. During that time period, some organizations were at the forefront of the technology evolution wave, and there were other organizations defined as laggards (slow to adopt) that joined at the end of this technology wave of evolution. Virtualization evolved to virtualization 2.0 (increased automation), and then to a private cloud with further automation and software‐defined data centers ...