Discussion

5.5.1 Technological context

The three dimensions of technological context are technology readiness, security concerns and technology barriers. Of these, only security concerns were observed as having a significant relationship with cloud adoption. The impact in this case was a negative one, in that security concerns may inhibit the adoption of cloud computing. This result agrees with findings of result of interviews discussed in chapter four (that security issues represent a barrier to cloud adoption decision). Oliveira et al. (2014) reported that security was not a significant inhibiting factor for cloud adoption, and suggested that this was due to improvements in cloud computing. It is argued here that cloud consumers may have security concerns due to a lack of understanding of security, and that this may reflect the particular issues in technologically developing environments. Enterprises need to understand data security issues and the sensitivity of their data in order to identify security issues and select the most suitable cloud deployment and service models.

Technology readiness and technology barriers were not found to be statistically significant. This result is consistent with the study of Low et al. (2011), who found that technology readiness was not a significant predictor. In terms of interview findings, technology readiness was not found to influence cloud migration in Saudi Arabia. As discussed in section 4.5.5, the findings show that although technology readiness in Saudi Arabia is high in major cities, cloud adoption rate is low. This might be because of differences in attitudes between decision makers in technologically developed and developing countries. This suggests that the barriers to cloud computing adoption in KSA are not primarily technical, but organisational.

5.5.2 Organisational context

Interestingly, three predictors were found to significantly influence the decision on adopting cloud computing: organisation readiness, top management support and enterprise status. From the literature, we had identified only one study which discussed organisation readiness as a factor that influences cloud computing adoption, and this study also found a significant relationship between organisation readiness and cloud adoption (Gangwar et al., 2015). In addition, the findings of interviews discussed in chapter four found that one of the barriers to cloud migration is the low organisation readiness in Saudi Arabia. This is in agreement with the findings of Aldraehim et al. (2012), which showed that organisational culture and readiness can be one of the main barriers to adopting e-services. Therefore, it is argued that enterprises having high organisational readiness are more able to adopt new technology, including cloud computing.

The literature review did not identify any prior studies which examined enterprise status empirically in relation to cloud adoption or technology adoption in general. The results from our study are that enterprise status has a significant impact (p=0.016) on the adoption of computing, as start-up enterprises were found to be more likely to adopt or consider adopting cloud computing. This result confirms the result of chapter four, which indicated that start-up companies were more likely to support cloud adoption. This is largely attributable to start-up companies’ lack of existing IT legacy system, which could make the adoption decision more costly and difficult. In addition, start-up enterprises prefer to spend on Opex rather than Capex (Firli et al., 2015).

The results from our investigation show that top management support significantly influences the adoption of cloud (P value at 0.001). This finding is in-line with previous

studies (Low et al., 2011; Alshamaila et al., 2013; Borgman et al., 2013; Oliveira et al., 2014; Gangwar et al., 2015). This emphasises that in the technology context, top management support is a key factor in adopting cloud technology; thus, as highlighted in the interviews, one of the main inhibitors preventing cloud adoption is the lack of top management support.

Contrary to the findings of the literature review, the findings of the questionnaire found there is no statistically significant (p= 0.173) impact between cloud adoption and enterprise size. However, as discussed in section 5.4.4, medium and small enterprises adopted cloud computing more than larger ones. This study confirmed the interview results, which argued that the enterprise size has impact on general, but in the case of Saudi Arabia, because cloud adoption is generally slow, it is difficult to pinpoint the exact relationship between enterprise size and cloud adoption. Previous studies conducted in UK and Portugal (Alshamaila et al., 2013; Oliveira et al., 2014) found a significant relationship between cloud adoption and enterprise size.

Industry sector was not found to be statistically significant (p= 0.486). However, as discussed earlier and shown in Error! Reference source not found., industry sectors with more sensitive data, such as banking and finance, have low a rate of adoption of cloud computing in KSA. Other sectors with less sensitive data have higher adoption, particularly the ICT and services sectors. However, this study differs from the findings of Alshamaila et al. (2013), which found the industry sector is a significant factor. One possible explanation for that is the representation of the different sectors in the survey and also factors specific to Saudi Arabia, such as legal restrictions for some sectors (e.g. finance) on the location of the storage of data.

5.5.3 Environmental context

The environmental context was examined from three dimensions, namely competitive pressure, external support and government support. Only one factor was found statistically significant, which is government support, unlike in the studies of Borgman et al. (2013) and Oliveira et al. (2014). Previous studies have found that in technologically developing countries, government support plays a major role in enabling enterprises to adopt new technology in terms of setting regulations and initiatives (Alghamdi et al., 2011; AlGhamdi et al., 2012). This finding is confirmed by the results of interviews; that the lack of regulation related to cloud computing is the one of the main barriers to increased growth of cloud computing adoption. One of the differences between developed and developing countries is that the private sector rely on government support.

One unanticipated finding from this survey was that external support, in the sense of support provided by CSP, did not significantly affect cloud adoption. Alshamaila et al. (2013) had found that computer supplier support has a significant effect on cloud adoption. However, the results from this survey, supported by comments made during the preliminary fieldwork and interviews, lead to the conclusion that cloud services provided by local (Saudi) CSPs are not yet mature.

In this study, competitive pressure was not found to be a significant factor affecting Could Commuting adoption, which is supported by the findings from interview discussed in section 4.4.4, corroborating Alshamaila et al. (2013) and Oliveira et al. (2014). Conversely, Gangwar et al. (2015) and Low et al. (2011) found that competitive pressure has a significant impact in association with cloud computing. A possible explanation for this is that the studies that found competitive pressure has a significant

factor were limited to particular industry sectors: a high-tech industry (Low et al., 2011) or manufacturing, finance and ICT (Gangwar et al., 2015).

5.5.4 Diffusion of innovation

It is somewhat surprising that relative advantage was not found to be a significant factor in this study, unlike in most existing work (Low et al., 2011; Alshamaila et al., 2013; Borgman et al., 2013; Oliveira et al., 2014; Gangwar et al., 2015). However, the findings do not mean the cloud computing does not have a relative advantage, since both adopters and non-adaptors reported some advantage to cloud computing adoption. In addition, relative advantage has the highest mean among all hypotheses, indicating that it is seen as an important element. In the interviews, respondents argued that adopting cloud computing could benefit enterprises in a number of ways such as saving cost, reduced time to produce applications or services, and focusing on core competencies.

Another important finding was that incompatibility has a significant negative impact on cloud computing adoption, This finding is in accord with recent studies that indicated a positive impact of incompatibility on cloud adoption (Alshamaila et al., 2013; Gangwar et al., 2015). Finally, unlike the findings of interviews, the complexity of migrating existing systems did not significantly affect cloud adoption. In the same way, Borgman et al. (2013) and Low et al. (2011) found that the challenge of migrating to the cloud did not have a negative impact on cloud computing adoption. This differs from recent studies affirming that complexity negatively influences cloud computing (Alshamaila et al., 2013; Oliveira et al., 2014; Gangwar et al., 2015). A summary of the findings from the survey is given in Table 5-11.

Technological context

H1 Technology readiness Not supported

H2 Security barriers Supported

H3 Technology barriers Not supported

Organisational context

H4 Organisational readiness Supported

H5 Firm size Not supported

H6 Firm status Supported

H7 Industry sector Not supported

H8 Top management support Supported

Environmental context

H9 Competitive pressure Not supported

H10 External support Not supported

H11 Government support Supported

Diffusion of innovation

H12 Relative advantage Not supported

H13 Compatibility Supported

H14 Complexity Not supported

Table 5-11: Summary of hypotheses testing results