Abstract:
The Information Technology (IT) era supports the adoption of Cloud Computing (CC)
on a large scale in many business fields, at which the Financial Institutions (FI) such as
Banking sector is not an exception.

Several gaps were found during the literature review. While several CC methods,
strategies, or frameworks have been proposed or utilized for CC adoption in many
economic sectors including the FI banks, it is still a relatively new initiative in many
other countries including Bahrain. While Enterprise Architecture (EA) is claimed to be
a leading information and business management discipline to develop an architecture
that guides the transformation to CC adoption of an enterprise from a baseline state to
a target state. However, there is an evident lack of scholarly articles on the development
of CC adoption frameworks from an EA perspective. Also, it was found that scholarly
articles in the evaluation of the CC adoption framework are scarce.

To address those gaps, this thesis aims at developing and evaluating a cloud computing
adoption framework for financial institutions (CCAFF) in Bahraini Banks by adapting
a tailored version of the Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) and
embedding a tailored version of an enterprise cloud adoption strategy (ECAS) and then
evaluating the CCAFF based on several criterians.

A six phased Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM) is employed to design
the research report, guide, and develop the CCAFF, while the exploratory nature of the
research necessitates the employment of a holistic single Case Study strategy for an FI01 bank, based on semi-structured interviews and document analysis data collection
techniques. Alongside, the data was analyzed using the pattern matching technique. For
the CCAFF evaluation, the Delphi technique was employed at which seven experts in
two rounded panels contribute to the evaluation findings based on six criteria.

The evaluation findings demonstrated promising results in terms of ease of use (86.4%),
usefulness (84.6%), decision-making support (86.6%), comprehensiveness (85.8%),
time efficiency (84.8%), and usage intention (84.8%).

Keywords: Cloud Computing Adoption, Strategy Framework, FI, Banks, Enterprise
Architecture, TOGAF, Kingdom of Bahrain.