Universiteit van Amsterdam
Identifying general cost
benefits from the adoption of
cloud computing services by
SME’s.
Elwin van Holsteijn
10268103
Supervisor: Ailko van der Veen
15-07-2016
Abstract
Cloud computing is a new paradigm in the field of Information Technology (IT). Servers are hosted and maintained by the cloud providers, and software is automatically updated for all users at the same time. It offers firms the ability to use the latest computing technologies without the need for upfront investments for in-house IT infrastructure and the employment of a skilled IT department. This makes cloud computing especially suitable for small and medium-sized enterprises (SME’s), as these organizations often lack the funds to make these large initial investments. The cost benefits of the adoption of cloud computing services for SME’s has been widely acknowledged by both the public and private sector in recent years and this potential has been identified in a large body of scientific literature. Empirical data has also been collected showing these benefits for specific markets in a number of studies. In this research paper, five empirical studies on the factors determining the adoption of cloud computing services by SME’s are analyzed and compared in order to identify
whether there exist cost benefits that can be applied to SME’s independent of the period of time, geographical market and sector they operate in. The findings can help firms in the decision to adopt cloud computing services or not.
Table of Content 1. Introduction 2. Literature review
2.1 Overview of cloud computing 2.2 Key advantages of cloud computing 2.3 Key challenges of cloud computing
3. Methodology 4. Findings 4.1 Summary of findings 4.2 Analysis of findings 5. Discussion 6. Conclusion References
1. Introduction
Cloud computing is the latest development in the field of information technology (IT), allowing businesses to access hardware and software computing services on-demand over the internet (Padhy & Patra, 2012). The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST, 2009) defines cloud computing as ‘a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction’.
The adoption of cloud computing has been increasing steadily since it became widely available for companies in 2006 and its market share is still continuing to grow (Carcery et al, 2014). The market for cloud computing was estimated at $41 billion and is predicted to exceed $240 billion by 2021 (Reuters, 2011). Furthermore, as cloud computing offerings continue to improve and mature, the benefits of ‘moving to the cloud’ continue to grow as well (Rightscale, 2016).
With the absence of up-front investments for in-house IT equipment, software licenses and a life-cycle investment in maintenance, cloud computing decreases the entry barriers for firms trying to enter new markets (Park & Sung, 2013). Small to medium-sized enterprises
(SME’s, firms with up to 250 employees and an annual turnover of up to €50 million
(European Commission, 2005)) with access to these services could potentially offer products and services that in the past only large corporations could deliver, thus decreasing the competitive advantages of these large firms (Alshamaila et al, 2013).
However, even with the large growth rates it is experiencing, the implementation of cloud computing services is not as common as would be assumed based on the widespread acknowledgement of the potential of this technology by both the public and private sector (Maresova & Klimova, 2015). Sheng (2014) suggests that this is because these benefits don’t apply to all firms in the same measure and in some situations it can actually raise IT costs for firms.
As one of the major reasons for the low rates of exploitation of cloud computing by firms is a lack of understanding and awareness of the potential benefits and opportunities for their specific situation (Maresova & Klimova, 2015; Rightscale, 2016), the identification of cost benefits that apply to firms in a general sense can help firms with the decision to adopt cloud computing services or not. Because there are so many factors involved, decision makers will be overwhelmed by the large amounts of data that are needed to make a complete cost and risk analysis on the effects of adopting cloud computing services for their firm (Martens & Teuteberg, 2012). There is certainly a need for more comprehensive models for firms to determine and quantify the cost potential for their situation more precisely, as e.g. the model constructed by Martens & Teutenberg (2012) on cloud computing decision-making and the model constructed by Beimborn (2008) on IT outsourcing, but the execution of such models will be too complex for many SME’s.
This is why the objective of the study is to identify cost benefits that apply to SME’s
independent of their geographical location, market and period of time in which they operate. Constructing general benefits that apply to all SME’s can help firms to make a decision whether to adopt cloud computing or not, without having to apply complex and
comprehensive models.
The next chapter will give an overview of the different cloud computing categories and list the key benefits and challenges of the technology. Chapter 3 gives the methodology and explains how the research question will be tried to answered. The results of four empirical studies on the factors influencing SME’s decision to adopt cloud computing services will be taken as a basis for this analysis. These studies have been conducted in different markets, periods of time and geographical areas, and are analyzed and compared to identify cost benefits and drawbacks that apply to SME’s in general and those that are determined by factors specific to firms or markets. The findings are presented with four tables listing the found cost benefits and drawbacks of the examined studies and an interpretation of these results follows. Afterwards a discussion will focus on the limitations of the research and the paper with end with a conclusion of the research.
2. Literature review
2.1 Overview of cloud computing
Cloud computing can broadly be divided into three categories: Software as a Service, Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service.
Software as a Service (SaaS). This composes all applications delivered to clients via the World Wide Web or a program interface (Subhankar, 2012). The finished applications run on the provider’s cloud infrastructure and are maintained and updated by the provider (NIST, 2009). This includes web-based email such as Gmail, office-type application such as Office365 and Google Docs, and CRM systems such as Salesforce (Padhy & Patra, 2012).
Platform as a Service (PaaS). This is the programming environment giving clients access to the operating system, programming languages, libraries and tools of the cloud provider to develop their own software and applications. Clients determine and develop the software design, without managing any of the underlying cloud infrastructure (Pady & Patra, 2012).
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). This composes all fundamental IT infrastructural services such as storage, networks and processing systems. The client has control over the
configuration of these services and manages the virtualized infrastructure, but does not operate any of the underlying physical cloud infrastructure (NIST, 2009).
2.2 Key advantages of cloud computing Multi-tenancy
Multi-tenancy means that the software of a particular cloud provider has only one version and runs on one server, but serves a multitude of tenants at the same time (Subhankar, 2012). This results in a more efficient management of resources by the provider, as maintenance, fixes and upgrades are performed for all clients simultaneously (Subhankar, 2012). This also means that computing resources can be used more efficiently, because the cloud provider is able to continuously utilize the servers to a high extent, whereas most individual firms running their own servers use only 10-30% of their available computing power on average (Marston et al, 2011).
Reduced total cost of ownership
As the cloud infrastructure is shared amongst many firms, the total cost of ownership is spread out over these users as well. The pay-per-use nature of the services allows each user to pay for exactly the capacity that is utilized by them, resulting in a more efficient and minimal capital expenditure (Subhankar, 2012). Furthermore, because cloud servers do not need to be pshysically located near the businesses they serve, they can be placed in geographical areas that have access to cheap internet, thus lowering the average operating costs (Marston et al, 2011).
Pilot projects
The elasticity and low upfront investment costs make cloud computing more beneficial for some specific businesses than others. Subhankar (2012) recognizes pilot projects as being especially suited for the adoption of cloud computing. As most pilot projects or start up initiatives generally have limited IT budgets, they are not able to invest in a sophisticated IT infrastructure. Furthermore, cloud services allow for an immediate deployment of additional infrastructure, so a company can quickly adapt to growing demand without losing money to overcapacity or losing business to undercapacity. In addition, according by the research presented in the State of the cloud Report (Rightscale, 2016), the cloud benefits have been increasing amongst ‘cloud beginners’, ‘cloud Explorers’ and ‘cloud focusts’, but this growth has been strongest amongst the cloud beginners. ‘Cloud beginners’ are defined as
companies new to cloud computing, Explorers already have projects or applications
deployed, but are looking to expand and ‘Focusts’ are heavily using cloud services and are focused on optimization (Rightscale, 2012). As cloud providers and best practices have matured, it becomes increasingly easy for new adopters to get the full benefits. This allows a pilot project to immediately deploy sophisticated cloud technologies.
2.3 Key challenges of cloud computing Security and privacy
Storing data in the cloud brings a whole new array of security concerns, such as cross border legal risks that emerge with servers storing data from foreign firms, access to data by third parties and governments, and the lack of policy, governance and law that is still to be fully developed by regulators (Clemons & Chen, 2011). Both regulators and cloud vendors are continuously in the process of constructing and shaping both the laws and policies and the technologies to guarantee the security of cloud users (Hoboken & Rubinstein, 2014).
However, the security risks are often overstated by firms due to a lack of knowledge and experience with cloud computing (Rightscale, 2016). The yearly conducted survey by Rightscale (2016) shows that as cloud computing is maturing and becoming more generally known, security is decreasingly seen as a cloud challenge. In addition, from the respondents that have been using cloud computing services for a longer period of time, a significantly smaller percentage sees security as one of their cloud challenges. Park & Sung (2013) identify both perceived improved security, as well perceived security risks, as important switching enablers and switching inhibitors respectively for firms deciding whether to adopt cloud computing services. As cloud computing is maturing, there is still a lot of ‘catch-up’ to be done on behalf/the side of all stakeholders.
Reliability and performance
Businesses require cloud computing services to at least be as reliable as their traditional IT counterparts. This means that cloud computing providers must guarantee uptimes that exceed the uptime that a firm’s in-house IT services maintain. Especially larger corporations demand their Service Level Agreement (SLA) to be at least 99.99% uptime, which many vendors are not able or willing to guarantee (Marston et al, 2011). However, for SME’s the uptimes that cloud providers offer will often be enough, while it might be considered
insufficient for large corporations. The uptime for the larger cloud providers is often actually higher than that of traditional IT practices used by firms. In 2013 for example, Gmail
maintained an uptime of 99.978%, counting for less than 2 hours in the entire year and is far higher than what they have included in their SLA (Google, 2016).
Lack of knowledge, skills and expertise
A lack of resources and expertise is identified by Rightscale (2015) as the top challenge for cloud adopting businesses and is consistent across firms with different levels of maturity. This is inhibiting firms to adopt the new technology in two major ways. The first is that because firms lack a sufficient level of general knowledge about the technology, they don’t realize the potential it can hold for their firm and they end up sticking to their current configuration of traditional IT services (Maresova & Klimova, 2015). For example, a study conducted by Alshamaila et al (2013) on the motivation of firms to adopt cloud computing or not showed that a considerable percentage of the examined firms either decided not to adopt the technology because the benefits were not clear to them, or justified their late reaction to adopting cloud computing to the lack of awareness about this type of services. The second is that many firms lack the tools and resources to implement, monitor and manage the cloud services (Alshamaila et al, 2013). Their staff needs to be educated and potentially new employees need to be hired, which can be costly.
3. Methodology
The research objective of this study is to identify the cost benefits and drawbacks influencing the adoption of cloud computing services by SME’s that are dependent and those that are independent of the geographical areas, periods of time, and markets in which a firm operates. Four empirical studies are examined that have focused on these benefits and challenges for specific markets. The four studies were conducted in the Sweden (Dimitrov et al, 2012), Ireland (Carcary et al, 2014), Australia (Lacity et al, 2014) and Finland (Mikkonen & Khan, 2016). These studies have used interviews or surveys to gather empirical data on the key factors influencing the adoption of cloud computing services by SME’s. The
respondents are from firms operating in a variety of different markets. Some of these studies have tried to identify a wide range of factors influencing this decision, but for the purpose of this study, only the data concerning the cost benefits and drawbacks will be used.
The cost benefits and drawbacks that are presented in the examined studies are
summarized in four tables. Afterwards, these summarizations are compared to see which of the specific cost benefits and drawbacks have applied to all respondents in the four studies and which have mixed relevance. A discussion examines the limitations of this method and the results that are found and afterwards a conclusion is constructed considering the meaning of these results.
4. Findings
4.1 Summary of findings
The study conducted by Dimitrov et al (2012) used interviews for the collection of empirical data. They interviewed seven companies located in Sweden in 2012. Four out of the seven companies were IT firms, one was a University, one was a regional innovation system and one was a trading company. All of the interviewees were IT professionals with varying roles within their organization. The questions were focused on the impact of cloud computing on organizations in regard to cost and security, but only the responses regarding the costs have been used for this study. Below is a table (Table 1.) summarizing the key findings regarding cost benefits and cost risks.
Cost benefits Cost risks and drawbacks
All respondents describe the cost reduction due to the elimination of (initial) investments in IT hardware as an important cost benefit of cloud computing. The cost savings in regard to the physical hardware are expanded by the decrease in operational and maintenance costs of the in-house servers.
Cost benefits are also received by a reduction in staff, as administration, maintenance, support and monitoring is performed by the cloud
The main cost risks are associated with the difficulty in estimating what the actual benefits will be. The cloud market has not matured sufficiently in order to allow firms to project current and future costs with enough certainty. There have yet to be pricing models constructed that are sophisticated enough to make an accurate assessment of the usage of and need for specific services and of the suitability of a specific cloud vendor in the growing number of providers.
Table 1. Summary of the cost benefits and costs risks associated with adopting cloud computing services by firms in the study of Dimitrov et al (2012).
Carcary et al (2014) studied the cloud computing adoption readiness and realization of the benefits for SME’s in Ireland. They conducted a survey across 95 firms with 250 employees or less and all were located in Ireland. From these 95 firms, 66 (70%) hold 1-9 employees, 25 (26%) hold 10-49 employees and the remaining 4 (4%) hold anywhere between 50 and 249 employees. In all 95 surveys, the owner or manager was the person that provided the answers. 46 (48%) of the respondents were firms operating in the knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) sector, 37 (39%) are firms from within the service sector and 12 (13%) are from the manufacturing sector. 43 (45%) of these firms had already adopted cloud computing services. A summarization of the results of the survey with regard to the costs of adopting cloud computing is presented in table 2.
Table 2. Summary of the cost benefits and costs risks associated with adopting cloud computing services by firms in the study of Carcary et al (2014).
provider’s employees and shared with all its clients.
Money spent on software licenses is reduced because all of the services are included in a combined offer and no separate licenses for different services need to be purchased. Also, because the deployment of updates is performed automatically for all users, firms do not have to invest money in the latest up-to-date software. These cost reductions are far more significant for private companies than for Universities and other public organizations, because those already receive large cost reductions in software licenses.
Finally, the cost benefits are identified as being largest for small and starting enterprises, because they don’t need the servers and IT departments to run their operations and they are not large enough to experience the economies of scale that large corporations have regarding efficiency of in-house IT infrastructure.
Additionally, moving to a different cloud provider is difficult and contains additional costs.
Cost benefits Cost risks and drawbacks
60% of the respondents state that cloud computing has reduced capital costs and for 37% of the firms it has neither reduced nor raised capital costs significantly.
Cloud computing has helped 55% of the firms to manage the operational costs and 40% states that it had no effect on managing operational costs.
3% of the respondents state that the adoption of cloud computing has not reduced capital costs of the firm.
5% of the firms state that the adoption of cloud computing has not helped with managing the operational costs of the firm.
Cost benefits Cost risks and drawbacks The most important factor in deciding to adopt
cloud computing services is the ability to reduce capital expenditure. As the need for
investments in physical hardware and in software licenses are no longer needed, costs are reduced.
The elimination of the need for highly experienced IT specialists is also stated as a reason for moving to the cloud. Especially for smaller businesses it is costly to maintain a whole tech department and thus a switch to the IT support of a cloud provider offers a cost reducing solution to these firms.
The increased agility, flexibility and scalability in the utilization of IT services results in reduced operational costs and capital expenditure. It also enables the firms to utilize more advanced IT technologies which increases the profitability.
Because cloud providers update and upgrade software for all users, the costs associated with regularly purchasing extensive upgrades are eliminated, resulting in lower and more controlled financial spending.
No risks or drawbacks concerning costs are stated by the respondents.
Table 3. Summary of the cost benefits and costs risks associated with adopting cloud computing services by firms in the study of Mikkonen & Khan (2016).
Mikkonen & Khan (2016) conducted interviews with six SME’s located in Finland for the collection of empirical data. All of the respondents were part of the IT staff of the firms. The purpose of the study was to determine the most important factors for firms in the decision to adopt cloud computing technologies or not. The respondents present the most important factors in the decision of their own firm as cost effectiveness, flexibility, lower technology risk, data security and effective IT support. A summary of their findings can be found in table 3.
Lacity et al (2014) conducted in-depth interviews with three SME’s in order to further
understand the cloud adoption process. The firms used for the study were Dana Foundation, holding 30 fulltime employees, Diesel Direct, with a fulltime staff of 200 employees and Art-World (pseudonym) with 40 fulltime employees. All firms were operating in Australia and the interviews were conducted with either the head of the IT department or the executives of the firm. Questions of the interview were designed to identify the main drivers of the firm’s decision to adopt cloud computing services and the responses regarding cost benefits and cost risks are summarized in table 5.
Table 4. Summary of the cost benefits and costs risks associated with adopting cloud computing services by firms in the study of Lacity et al (2014).
4.2 Analysis of findings
In all studies respondents stated that the adoption of cloud computing services has resulted in a reduction of capital expenditure. The elimination of investments for in-house physical IT infrastructure allows firms to access the latest computing technologies while keeping costs low. In addition, these cost savings are increased by the reduction in the costs of operational and maintenance tasks that are transferred to the cloud providers. However, even though these benefits are stated in all studies, not all respondents state that capital expenditure and operational costs have significantly decreased. Diesel Direct, one of the firms analyzed in
Cost benefits Cost risks and drawbacks
Cost reduction was stated as one of the three key drivers for adopting cloud computing by Dana Foundation. This reduction was largely realized by replacing the outsourcing provider that handled the technical support before with the cloud provision.
Art-World gave cost avoidance as one of its two key drivers in the adoption of cloud computing. As a start-up, their main objective in this stage was to keep costs low. Cloud computing offered a solution for this, because costs for
underutilized in-house hardware is avoided as they pay exactly for what they use to the cloud provider.
Diesel Direct gave the access to highly skilled support at the cloud provider as one of its two key cloud computing drivers. As they are a growing firm, they will increasingly need to use more advanced IT technologies and people operating this, but have not yet reached the size where they can afford to hire this staff themselves. The other key driver for Diesel Direct was the scalability and flexibility of cloud computing services. This allows them to rapidly adjust to monthly and seasonal fluctuations in demand without investing in large in-house capacities, that would often be heavily underutilized, to be able to handle these fluctuations.
Overall Dana Foundation and Art World found that cloud computing offered significant cost savings, while these were only minor for Diesel Direct.
No risks or drawbacks concerning costs are stated by the respondents.
the study of Lacity et al (2014) shows only minor cost savings and Carcary et al (2014) show that capital expenditure and operational costs have even increased for 3% and 5% of the firms respectively.
As software updates are automatically deployed by the cloud vendor, and different services contained in a single offer, firms no longer have to purchase multiple software licenses and pay for upgrades to stay up-to-date. The elimination of the need to purchase software licenses reduces the initial investments needed in the IT infrastructure. Furthermore, as no additional fee is charged for upgrades, the operational costs are more controlled and continuous.
Reductions in staff are realized by the replacement of experienced IT staff, traditionally needed to operate the complex technologies, by the technical support of the cloud providers, as well as by the elimination of staff needed to operate and maintain the physical IT
infrastructure.
In several studies the respondents specifically mention the cost benefits that are realized by the flexibility and scalability that cloud computing offers. Firms can rapidly adjust to changes in demand for computing power and do not have to invest in overcapacity to anticipate on large fluctuations.
Risks and drawbacks associated with the adoption of cloud computing are only clearly stated in the study conducted by Dimitrov et al (2014). The respondents from that study have experienced that it is difficult to estimate the exact cost benefits that apply to their firm. They also state that it is difficult and expensive to switch to a different cloud vendor after adoption.
Discussion
The data is used from studies that were conducted in countries with relatively comparable economic and cultural characteristics, thus limiting the applicability of the findings to a smaller range of countries. For example, Tashkandi & Al-Jabri (2015) found that one of the major inhibitors of a widespread adoption of Cloud computing in Saudi Arabia is the high costs associated with getting a high speed internet data rate. Because Cloud computing assumes a fast and reliable internet connection, this raises the cost for Cloud computing and presents new cost drawbacks that the firms in the four examined studies did not experience. Furthermore, Martens & Teuteberg (2012) state that most studies focus only on specific aspects of adopting cloud computing while a comprehensive perspective is needed to capture the complexity of the process. A focus on specific aspects oversimplifies the other relevant factors and can lead to incorrect conclusions. Finally, the fact that the respondents in some of the used studies do not provide any drawbacks or cost risks associated with adopting cloud computing services does suggest that the examined studies were focused primarily on studying the benefits.
Conclusion
The objective of this research paper was to identify cost benefits of the adoption of cloud computing services by SME’s that hold true independent of the specific period of time, the geographical area and market that the firms operate in. In order to do this, five empirical studies that have focused on the cost benefits SME’s experience when adopting cloud computing technologies were analyzed. These studies had been conducted in different periods times ranging from 2012 to 2016, and the firms were located in Australia, Ireland, Finland and Sweden in a variety of different sectors.
There were several cost benefits that were evident amongst respondents in most or all studies. The reduction in up-front investments and capital expenditure due to the elimination of physical in-house IT infrastructure was stated as a cost reduction by most respondents. While some respondents did not identify this as a key cost benefit for their firm, only 5% of respondents in the study performed by Carcery et al (2014) stated this as a cost increase. This suggests that the capital expenditure of traditional IT services will be at least of the same level or lower for the vast majority of SME’s, regardless of the specific geographical area, the market or time period they operate in. It should be noted that the geographical area pertains to the western society here, as all studies were conducted in countries within the western world.
The other cost benefits that were given by were not as widely stated by respondents in every study. However, they were also not found to be cost risks or drawbacks in any of the studies. The reductions in costs due to the elimination of maintaining and operating the in-house servers, the reduced and more controlled operating costs as a result of the elimination of the purchase of periodic upgrades and varied software licenses, and the reduction of needed IT staff as expertise, monitoring and maintenance is moved to the cloud provider, are all identified as significant cost benefits in the majority of the studies. Furthermore, none of these are noted to contain clear risks or drawbacks. This suggests that at least one of these cost benefits will apply to SME’s regardless of their specific geographical area, period of time and market in which they operate, but which one specifically will be determined by factors not examined in this paper.
The cost benefits that have been identified in this study can help SME’s with the decision to adopt cloud computing services for their firm. There was no clear evidence that showed specific cost benefits that apply to every single firm, but there were several benefits found from which at least one applied to the respondents, while the others didn’t pose any clear risks or drawbacks. Firms can use this information to make an assessment of which of the benefits will be most applicant to their own firm, based on their own knowledge of the organization, without having to apply complex and comprehensive models.
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