Towards an Information Governance Framework for the Cloud

Cloud Service Providers and Consumers are faced with the challenge of ensuring information governance over the cloud often combined with the fast accumulating Big Data collected from a variety of sources. Assessing cloud readiness in terms of information governance is not a trivial matter, even when the organization has existing foundation in traditional information governance. The need for an information governance framework for the cloud is becoming more apparent as small businesses prepare to take the first tentative step onto the cloud bandwagon. Research shows that organizations transitioning their data from traditional on premise to cloud based models are facing information related problems that are difficult to solve using traditional approaches. It is obvious that the difficulty in defining the problem leads to ill-developed solutions that are either unsuitable or only partially suitable for IG issues. This paper applies content analysis to firstly identify those complex IG situations that are challenging to understand and difficult to act upon; this will help towards formulating a framework for cloud based information governance. The problem context is formulated with the aid of extensive literature review and technical blogs' analyses.