In comparison to traditional IT paradigms, cloud computing enables to obtain desired computing resources on-demand without requiring large, upfront investments and to dynamically adapt and scale these resources to varying business requirements. However, cloud computing is not a panacea. This drives the need to examine the specific reasons and requirements for cloud adoption in practice. In this paper, we take a twofold approach for this purpose. First of all, we follow an analytical approach by conducting a literature survey on existing adoption frameworks in order to analyze the complete life cycle of the adoption process and derive five hypotheses for cloud adoption. In the second step, we identify the major criteria that foster the adoption of cloud computing from the perspective of IT experts within an empirical study