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Cloud computing (CC), an Internet-based and on-demand IT service model, was first put forward by the Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, at the 2006 Search Engine Conference. In the CC model, the development, deployment, update, maintenance, and payment of IT services undergo fundamental changes (Marston et al., 2011). With the rapid development, the business value of CC, which has always been a topic of great concern in the IT domain (Anandhi et al., 1999; Dewan & Ren, 2011; Steelman et al., 2019; Weill, 1992), has attracted the interest of academic and industry. CC is believed to have the advantages of reducing the cost of information infrastructure, providing fast and convenient access to hardware and software, lowering the barriers to IT innovation, facilitating the expansion of the service scale, and promoting new applications and services (Marston et al., 2011). However, the centralized nature of CC also causes some shortcomings (Bayramusta & Nasir, 2016; Joe-Wong & Sen, 2018; Euripidis et al., 2019; Marston et al., 2011). The primary obstacles of cloud adoption are the privacy and security issues, which bring risks to the adopters and hinder the dissemination of CC (Wang et al., 2019). The essential high speed internet access brings additional cost to cloud adoption (Bayramusta & Nasir, 2016). Further, the migration of the legacy system to the cloud increases the integration requirement because of the unified data and interface standards that are different from that of the legacy system (Joe-Wong & Sen, 2018; Loukis et al., 2019). It was reported that, for instance, Symantec clients were prevented from administering some email and web security services lasted for 24 hours due to the disruption caused by integration defect (Tsidulko, 2015). Another example is that the data entered by Salesforce customers into Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems were wiped out also resulted from integration issues and took days to fix it (Lauchlan, 2016).
These positive and negative studies and reports focusing on the impact of CC just show one side of the coin. The regular pattern of CC value achievement in the long-run is still not clear. Since firms invest an amount of capital on CC, maybe at the cost of the legacy systems, it is fair to question what will a firm experience after investing in CC and whether the firm receives its investment’s worth? Therefore, considering the uncertainty, the CC pay-off in the long-run needs more empirical investigation.