Abstract:

Cloud infrastructure solutions in South Africa are still in its infancy and it must be assessed if it is capable for use by the manufacturing sector where costs are a concern and rapid delivery of service is a requirement. The research is conducted in a local manufacturing company in which the population is all of the employees who can influence cloud migration. The research follows the positivistic paradigm and questionnaires are used to collect the data. Factor analysis is used to analyse the data and network performance tests are also run. Two significant factors namely security and business productivity are identified, with network performance showing that the performance of on premise servers are significantly better than that of cloud servers. It is concluded that manufacturing companies in South Africa should wait for cloud solutions to mature as well as wait for more advanced telecommunications technologies before attempting to use cloud solutions for daily operations. Future research possibilities include making use of the interpretivism methodology to gain insight from an interpretative perspective, increasing the Likert scale from 5 to 10 to gain better results from the data collected, and research can be conducted at multiple manufacturing companies to gain better experiences and results across South Africa and globally.