Determinants of Cloud Services Adoption

Abstract

Cloud services are viewed as a new paradigm of computing provision shifting to the network in the form of services. More and more firms are planning to adopt cloud services recently. Thus, understanding drivers and barriers of cloud adoption from firms’ point of view becomes very important. Though many qualitative studies have already addressed the adoption factors of cloud services, none of previous research has empirically examined these antecedents using large scale of data. Furthermore, a complete and integrated framework which can help firms evaluate whether they should step into cloud is lacked in the current literature. To bridge this gap, our study uses technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework and IT governance to develop a cloud service adoption model. Using telephone survey, we collected 200 public Taiwanese firms to empirically examine our proposed model. Our results show that cloud adoption is still at its initial stage (IaaS adoption rate=13%; PaaS adoption rate=5%; SaaS adoption rate=30%) and only factors in the technology context within the TOE framework would significantly influence cloud services adoption. The interesting finding is quite different from previous innovation diffusion studies which focus on mature stage of innovation diffusion. Our study affirms that in the early stage of innovation (cloud) adoption, historically important factors in organization and environment contexts have very limited impacts. We explain the phenomenon using the viewpoint of innovation diffusion curve: the current cloud adopters are innovators whose characteristics are adventurous, daring to attempt new things, and leading the crowd. These pioneers love to embrace just launched technologies, and are not easily affected by other people. Instead, they will affect general public later. As a result, we suggest cloud service providers focus more on promoting the benefits and alleviating the concerns of cloud services when marketing their cloud services at early stage.