Selection of Cloud Service Providers: A Fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis Approach

Selection of a cloud service provider (CSP) is an important decision for businesses that make long-term investments. Notably, this process is a complex decision that involves assessing multiple criteria where more than one condition jointly may dictate the decision. In addition, the selection decision can be explained with more than one equally effective configuration of conditions. Moreover, the causal configurations for predicting the rejection of a CSP are unique and may not mirror opposites of the causal configurations of the selection of a CSP. Prior studies commonly apply traditional regression-based linear modeling techniques and thus far, these techniques do not fully capture the complexity of CSP selection but rather identify the individual and isolated effects of the conditions. This study fills the gap by proposing a new configuration framework, which posits that CSP selection does not depend on individual conditions, but on their specific configurations. The configurational model has been validated using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis method. The results suggest three configurations to select and reject a CSP in conjunction with the implications to research and practice.