| The use of the cloud is an appealing option for many organizations (Srinivasan, 2013) and many are making the successful move to an external cloud environment (AWS Customer Success, n.d; Microsoft Azure, n.d). However, the absence of the implementation (Trigueros-Preciado, Perez-Gonzalez, & Solana-Gonzalez, 2013) and strategy (Senarathna, Yeoh, Warren, & Salzman, 2016) information in the literature, associated with an organizational move to the cloud, prevails. Subsequently, the main research question for this qualitative exploratory study----What are the strategies Cybersecurity Managers need to build correct decisions for transitioning to the cloud?----allowed for the exploration and the elicitation of the information. A population of 10 United States (U.S.) based small and medium enterprise (SME) cybersecurity managers, in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, and the use of semi-structured interviews provided answers to the research question. The study identified and documented the use of seven strategies that provide novel information for the academic and industry communities about the strategies used, and recommended, considering a cybersecurity perspective. The results of the study revealed a correlation between cybersecurity-focused strategies and underlying business context of making effective decisions within an organization, where the decisions rest on an understanding of the business and the external cloud environment. The evidence noted in this research study provides an immediate benefit, considering the absence of the information in the modern literature, and introduces a rudimentary decision-making roadmap for stakeholders in making the decisions needed for a move to the cloud. |
