Drivers and inhibitors for the adoption of public cloud services in Germany

Abstract

In this paper, we present an empirical study on the factors that influence companies in their decision regarding the adoption of Cloud Computing services. While this issue has been subject to a number of studies in the past, most of these approaches lack in the application of quantitative empirical methods or the appreciation of the inherent risk. With our study we focus on the factors that promote and inhibit the adoption of cloud services with a particular consideration of application risks. Our findings show that decision makers are significantly influenced by the risk of data loss in the first place but also by the risk that comes along with the service provider or technical issues that might occur during the use of the service. On the other side, the attractiveness could be identified as an important driver for the adoption of cloud services.