## 6 Discussion  
Integrating DOI and HOT-fit, our quantitative findings suggests that organizational and human factors significantly influence organizations' cloud computing adoption decisions for HPC. Specifically,decision makers' perceptions of indirect benefits and existing HPC competences predict their cloud computing adoption decisions with an overall correct prediction rate of 77%. Notwithstanding this, our qualitative findings suggest that organizational and technological issues related to data privacy and security are a significant concern today and will be in to the future. **Human factors. ** The results indicate that, even though innovativeness is high, this does not necessarily lead to cloud computing adoption. This finding is inconsistent with previous studies [5; 9]. Descriptive statistics reported in Table 3 show that personal innovativeness is the top-rated factor of cloud computing adoption for HPC. Thus, the reasons behind this inconsistency merit further investigation. The results also suggest that organizations with superior HPC competences perceive themselves to possess more advanced computing abilities, and thus are more willing to adopt cloud computing [8]. The insignificant relationship between IT competences and adoption may be because organizations with sufficient IT expertise may have gone through some of the technological changes required for cloud computing, reducing the impact of technological competences on the cloud computing adoption but an increased effect on the extent of cloud computing implementation [6]. Existing literature also reports mixed results with some reporting positive impacts [8; 29; 32], while others report insignificant results [6; 34]. Human factors thus require further investigation. **Technological factors. ** None of the technological factors--compatibility, complexity, and reliability and security--influence the adoption of cloud computing for HPC. However, there may be alternative explanations for these results. First, organizations may realize that the benefits of adopting cloud computing for HPC are likely to outweigh the perceived complexity. Thus, they may adopt cloud computing for HPC to maximize these perceived benefits. Second, the results may reflect different cloud conceptualizations. Pure private clouds, and hybrid clouds may not have the same security concerns as public clouds although this is widely disputed (see, for example, [39]). Third, if the organizations perceive themselves as having superior existing technological competences, they may adopt cloud computing regardless of the compatibility between cloud computing and their existing HPC systems or processes. Fourth, though cloud security remains a major concern [5], the technological advances in securing data privacy and confidentiality on cloud computing platforms may have given organizations confidence in implementing cloud services [7; 39]. Furthermore, as highlighted by the Delphi study, data privacy and security are both a significant concern for HPC in the cloud today and moving forward, which needs to be addressed by the cloud computing industry. **Organizational factors. ** Only perceived indirect benefits significantly influenced cloud computing adoption decision for HPC. This is congruent with previous studies [3; 8; 29], suggesting that indirect benefits have a strong influence on adoption [33]. A useful implication arising from this is that cloud computing service providers should highlight the wider set of benefits associated with adopting cloud computing for HPC to their customers in order to increase their likelihood to adopt. Surprisingly, adequate resources and top management support are not found to influence cloud computing adoption for HPC. These results contradict many prior studies [5; 6; 7; 29]. Finally, cost reduction does not influence cloud computing adoption for HPC. This may be HPC-specific as HPC typically involves specialist computing and scientific expertise where the decision-making is devolved to those with the required expertise.