The Study on Awareness and Adoption of Cloud Computing by Academics in Sri Lankan Universities

Abstract

The main objective of this study is to understand the level of awareness and adoption of cloud computing by the academic staff in Sri Lankan universities. This study aimed at investigating the level of awareness of this emerging technology and the extent that they use cloud computing, and the reasons for adoption and non-adoption. The study found that two-third of the sample respondents are not aware of cloud computing. The level of adoption is limited to several applications, namely Google Apps Engine and Dropbox. Cost and time saving were stated as the reasons for adoption and the lack of benefits and security concerns were stated as the most important drivers for nonadoption. Although 78.4% of the respondents stated to be aware of cloud computing, but only 14% confirmed they are very knowledgeable about it. Considering the benefits that cloud computing could offer to organizations, this trend provokes for more involvement from the government and cloud computing service vendors to further promote this technology to the universities. I. INTRODUCTIONThe recent many cloud computing adoption studies by many organizations in different sectors stated that although users realized the opportunities available from the cloud technology, the adoption of the technology is still very low (Aboelmaged, 2010). Therefore, identifying the factors of cloud technology adoption, especially at the user level, has become paramount importance, hence received much attention from researchers (Ekufu, 2012). Thus, Williams (2010) argued that the most reported barriers for cloud adoption are the issues of security and trust. Other commonly reported factors, as highlighted in Shimba, (2010), include the dilemma in recognizing the benefits and the cost of shifting to cloud, the legal compliance issue, and the organizational impact as a result of the adoption.Although many advantages and opportunities could be realized from the adoption of cloud computing, the level of adoption by different people and organizations varies in scale. Further, there have been lesser number of researches in this area (Jäätmaa, 2010;Obeidat & Turgay, 2012;Sriram & Khajeh-hosseini, 2008). Most of the prior research had mainly focused on the adoption effect to the firm and also the technical issues inherent in cloud implementations (Obeidat & Turgay, 2013). Other notable cloud issues which were studied were cloud architecture (Saya, Pee, & Kankanhalli, 2010), cloud applications (Liu & Orban, 2008), cloud cost benefits (Dillon, Wu, & Chang, 2010) and cloud adoption process (Alshamaila, Papagiannidis, & Li, 2013). However, none of those studies were done in Sri Lanka. Hence, this study in the context of the adoption by the university academics is a paramount considering the significant contribution to the higher education and the economic development of this country.The objectives of this study falls in to two dimensions. At first, it investigates the level of awareness and adoption of cloud computing by the academic staff of Sri Lankan national universit...

Investigating the Use of Cloud Computing Services among Postgraduate Students at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria

“…Low awareness is the main factor that indicates the adoption or non-adoption of cloud computing (Sathye, 1999). According to Irshad and Johar (2017), the adoption of cloud computing is still at a very low level. Awosan (2014), Kostanica, Youssef and Zeqiri (2017) are of the opinion that awareness of CCS would influence its use.…”