South African small and medium-sized enterprises' reluctance to adopt and use cloud-based business intelligence systems: A literature review

Abstract

The research work in this paper focused on cloud security challenges that prevented South African small and medium-sized enterprises from adopting and using various cloud-based business intelligence systems. The study conducted a literature review on 39 publications which were meticulously extracted from various electronic databases. Only 7 publications (5 journal articles, 1 conference proceeding, and 1 report) focused on security as a challenge to adoption of cloud-based services and BI systems by small and medium-sized enterprises. The results of the literature review indicated that security threats and vulnerabilities in various cloud deployments and services, and mistrust of cloud service providers by small and medium-sized enterprises were the main security challenges to adoption of cloud-based BIs by small and medium-sized enterprises in South Africa. The study also established that standard tools used by large business enterprises were unavailable or inapplicable to small and medium-sized enterprises which intended to adopt and utilise cloud-based BI systems.