A Cloud Readiness Assessment Framework for Enterprise Content Management and Social Software (E-Collaboration) in Small and Medium Sized Enterprises

Cloud computing is an emerging technology that offers opportunities for organisations to hire precisely those ICT services they need (SaaS/PaaS/IaaS). Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) can benefit a lot from software services that are managed in a professional way. Cloud computing enables them to overcome restrictions from low budgets and limited resources for ICT. However, cloud adoption is challenging and requires a clear cloud roadmap. Organisations lack knowledge of cloud computing and are usually challenged by the adoption of cloud services. In most cases, SMEs do not know what aspects they have to take into consideration for a sound decision in favour or against the cloud. A cloud readiness assessment is a general approach to facilitate this decision-making process. The presented study focuses on the development of an assessment framework for cloud services (SaaS) in the domain of enterprise content management (ECM) and social software (e-collaboration).