Issues in the Study of Organisational Resilience in Cloud Computing Environments

Cloud computing is a promising ICT service delivery model that has already had a significant impact on government agencies, SMEs and large organisations. Even though its current adoption is moving away from the early stage to the mainstream, many organisations are still concern about the additional levels of abstraction that cloud environments introduce. Particularly, this additional complexity represents a hurdle in the assessment of ICT readiness for organisational resilience, and no consensus exists yet for its analysis. Based on a literature review of cloud computing reference architectures, and organisational resilience and business continuity frameworks, this paper suggests a framework to guide research into this field from an operational perspective.