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

TL;DR

This survey identifies key technical and security barriers, especially security concerns, that significantly hinder organizations from adopting cloud services, highlighting the need to address these issues for wider adoption.

Contribution

The study provides empirical evidence on security, privacy, and portability as major barriers, quantifies their impact, and emphasizes the importance of technical and security factors in cloud adoption decisions.

Findings

Security concerns increase non-adoption likelihood up to 26 times

Security, data privacy, and portability are primary adoption inhibitors

Technical and security barriers critically influence organizational decisions

Abstract

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 of technology.