A survey study on major technical barriers affecting the decision to adopt cloud services

Title of the article: A survey study on major technical barriers affecting the decision to adopt cloud services

Authors: Nattakarn Phaphoom, Xiaofeng Wang, Sarah Samuel, Sven Helmer, Pekka Abrahamsson

Notes:

• This is the author’s version of the work.
• The definite version was published in: Phaphoom, N., Wang, X., Samuel, S., Helmer, s., & Abrahamsson, P. (2015) A survey study on major technical barriers affecting the decision to adopt cloud services. The Journal of Systems and Software 103 (2015) 167–181

Copyright holder’s version

• Copyright owner’s version can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2015.02.002

This is the author’s version of the work. The definite version was published in: Phaphoom, N., Wang, X., Samuel, S., Helmer, s., & Abrahamsson, P. (2015) A survey study on major technical barriers affecting the decision to adopt cloud services. The Journal of Systems and Software 103 (2015) 167–181, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2015.02.002

A survey study on major technical barriers affecting the decision to adopt cloud services

Nattakarn Phaphoom, Xiaofeng Wang, Sarah Samuel, Sven Helmer, Pekka Abrahamsson

In the context of cloud computing, risks associated with underlying technologies, risks involving service models and outsourcing, and enterprise readiness have been recognized as potential barriers for the adoption. To accelerate cloud adoption, the concrete barriers negatively influencing the adoption decision need to be
identified. Our study aims at understanding the impact of technical and security-related barriers on the organizational decision to adopt the cloud. We analyzed data collected through a web survey of 352 individuals working for enterprises consisting of decision makers as well as employees from other levels within an organization. The comparison of adopter and non-adopter sample reveals three potential adoption inhibitor, security, data privacy, and portability. The result from our logistic regression analysis confirms the criticality of the security concern, which results in an up to 26-fold increase in the non-adoption likelihood. Our study underlines the importance of the technical and security perspectives for research investigating the adoption

1. Introduction

Cloud computing is considered by many a paradigm shift in com- puting, representing a fundamental change in the way IT services are developed, offered, acquired, and paid for (Marston et al., 2011; Voas and Zhang, 2009). Ideally, in this paradigm a cloud service provider owns and manages a pool of computing resources, serving the gen- eral public by means of multi-tenancy. Computing services can be acquired over the Internet through self-service interfaces and ser- vice usages are automatically metered, allowing a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) model (Armbrust et al., 2010). Currently, cloud services are available in at least three different models (Mell and Grance, 2009): Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The services are usually deployed in one of the four settings, public, private, hybrid, or community cloud infrastructures. The cloud promises tremendous benefits for enterprises (Khajeh-Hosseini et al., 2011; Phaphoom et al., 2013) such as financial

efficiency (Armbrust et al., 2010; Marston et al., 2011; Rafique et al., 2011), operational excellence (Goodburn and Hill, 2010; Harris et al., 2010), and continuous innovation (Harris et al., 2010; Jasti et al., 2011; Mladenow et al., 2012). According to the Gartner hype cycle, cloud computing has progressed through a period of inflated expectations and has been predicted to reach mainstream adoption in 2–5 years (LeHong and Fenn, 2013). The annual survey conducted by North- bridge and Gigaom (North Bridge Venture Partners, 2013), based on 855 respondents, reveals continuous growth of cloud demand. From 2012 to 2013 IaaS’s growth rate was at 29%, followed by PaaS (22%) and SaaS (15%). A study by IDC on behalf of DG Connect of the Eu- ropean Commission (Bradshaw et al., 2012) has predicted that the European public cloud market will reach 11 billion Euros in revenue in 2014, increasing from 4.6 billion Euros in 2011. A global cloud provider survey conducted by KPMG (KPMG International, 2012b) also reports providers’ expectations to increase their cloud revenue, in proportion to the total income, from 27% to 50% on average by 2014. Although cloud computing promises great benefits to enterprise

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