Cloud technologies have covered the information technology landscape in the recent 15 years. They have been huge enablers of various IT startups and also empower large organizations through increased performance, scalability, and unprecedented resources optimization. Despite the potential for cloud technology to quickly bridge gaps in know-how, infrastructure, and budget that are common in developing countries, the pace of cloud adoption has varied across diferent regions and countries.. In this paper we report on an empirical study that aimed highlighting the influencing factors of cloud adoption in Albania. Various cloud adoption influencing factors that are reported in the literature have been investigated through a questionnaire iflled by 71 members of the Albanian information technology community. Most of them work as software developers and the their respective organizations have an international market scope (ofshore services). Through inferential statistics, results show that the most influencing factor of cloud adoption in Albania's case is availability. Other confirmed influencing factors are cost, performance, and security.
1. Introduction
are nowadays a long standing reality of most modern
information technology systems. They consists of huge
computing resources made largely available through
networked devices [
ing private or public sector information systems. Cloud
computing technologies benefits seem like a perfect fit
for them [
ready adopted in full the various cloud technologies [
In this paper we aim on identifying the specific factors (mostly from a technological point of view) that have influenced the current adoption level in Albania by surveying several members of the information technology ecosystem of the country. Since recent developments in the IT market have consisted on a noticeable shift towards ofshore services ofering, many IT professionals have invested themselves in increasing their know-how on cloud related technologies.
0000-0001-7483-6802 (K. Hoxha) nEvelop-O (D. Aliko) Proceedings of RTA-CSIT 2023, April 26–27, 2023 Tirana, Albania
Several cloud computing technologies adoption
including focused studies related to developing countries have
been reported in the literature [
The Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) is
a common framework of conducting empirical research
on cloud adoption [
some of the consulted related works.
resources that would enable large data centers empower- in Albania in relate to this. Section 3 details the used © 2023 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License adoption based on many studies, while quality of service, Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). availability, and flexibility are some of the positive influ- tem providers in Albania. It is a qualitative study showencing factors. casing case studies from major players ofering these
In the remaining of this section are mentioned some services in Albania. Results show that cloud technoloprevious works that investigated cloud adoption in Al- gies are fully adopted from all of them. bania. All of them present case studies of cloud tech- In another study, Kruja et al. [14] investigate about the nologies usage and report on surveyed data (through adoption of SaaS systems from small and medium sized questionnaires). It was noted that the inferential statis- hotels in Tirana, the capital of Albania. Their results tics methods were not fully reported for most of them. show that most of the surveyed hotels use traditional sys
Alite and Shurti [
Kycyku and Ali [
Shkurti [
Security Performance
Perception / Knowledge
H6
H7 H5
Privacy
H8 Cloud Technologies Adoption Availability
Cost H2
H3 H1
Quality of
Service H4
Flexibility
nologies. Redundant infrastructures spread over diferent geographic zones are easier to achieve and maintain [16]. Furthermore, Content Delivery Networks (CDN) afect the speed of access of web based services through connecting end users with infrastructure clusters nearer to them. This is especially true in Albania’s case. IT systems in Albania often do not cope well during increased system loads. Electrical power instability also afects the cost related to maintaining a reliable IT infrastructure in certain areas.
Cloud technologies are ofered in varied service models
[
At an application level, Platform as a service (Paas)
and Software as a service (SaaS) are two example service
models [
The high diversity of service models requires a good
knowledge and perception of them in order to make the
right adoptions. Since the data storage is ofloaded to the
cloud providers in most cases, privacy remains a high
concern too [
H 5 Good knowledge and perception of Cloud Services models positively influences cloud adoption.
Cloud computing architectures are often layered
similarly to the OSI model. The most common layers are
the infrastructure, platform, and application [18]. One of
the main benefits is that it ofers quickly scalable high
performing computing power. It is possible to execute
a particular computation within a predetermined time
frame on a cloud-based computing cluster that is
exclusively reserved for the duration of the computation.
3.1. Adopting Factors & Hypotheses
Cloud technologies ofer a high level of flexibility . Al
Khater et al. [
Li et al. [15] point out that cloud adopters ofload their computation / information processing needs to public cloud services providers. The main gain of this is a considerable diference related to infrastructure costs and reliability. On demand pricing schemes empower the scalability of various systems. Infrastructure power may be scaled up on a demand basis. Furthermore, there is no need for dedicated personnel on maintaining / monitoring the related hardware.
However, smaller markets (like Albania) sometimes do
not involve very large infrastructure costs and often are
hesitant in regards to adopting the cloud, believing that
cost benefits might not be noticeable [
H 2 Cost positively influences cloud technologies adoption.
H 3 Quality of Service positively influences cloud adoption.
Cloud technologies need to be elastic. The time needed
to perform an infrastructure change shouldn’t afect the
running information system quality of service. As pointed
out in [
used to legacy processes having full control of the data virtually and physically, see a real challenge on handing over their data to third party cloud providers. Proper measures related to these serious concerns would aid on increasing the cloud adopting.
Hybrid cloud models [
H 7 A high level of security measures positively influences
cloud adoption.
still considerable (69.2%). Need to be noted though that
market scope data is not available for all questionnaire
responses.
4.2. Validity and Reliability Check
H 8 A high level of privacy positively influences cloud Before proceeding with the hypothesis testing through
adoption. statistical analysis a variables validity (accuracy of
measure instruments) and reliability (consistency) check was
performed.
4. Methodology In the same line with the works of Sallehudin et al. [
An online questionnaire was spread online through a A value greater than 0.7 is considered highly reliable combination of social network platforms and contacts in for both CA and CR, while a value between 0.6 and 0.7 various Albania based IT companies. The non profiling for the same is considered acceptable. In order for the questions of the questionnaire used a 4-point likert scale: variables to be valid, they need to have an AVE value of 1 -> ”Strongly Disagree, 4 -> ”Strongly Agree”. at least 0.5. Considering this we ignored the ”Quality of
The actual questions that aimed on measuring the Service” variable due to low CR and AVE values.
influencing factors were mostly based on [
Most of the participants have been in the industry long for analyzing likert scale questionnaires. The acceptable enough to have the experience needed on judging the significance level is less than 0.05. cloud technologies benefits and related problems. Most Results are shown in Table 5. The strength of the relaof the respondents are software developers (74.6%), while tionship has been labeled using the scale mentioned in a couple of them act as managers / team leaders in their [13]. The hypothesis H3 couldn’t be tested due to the inrespective organizations. validity of the ”Quality of Service” variable as mentioned
About 70% of the respondents’ organizations are in above.
the Banking, Finance, Telco, and marketing industries. Based on the achieved results there is a strong
relationRegarding the cloud technologies adoption from their ship between ”Availability” and ”Cloud Adoption”. This
working organizations, 76.1% of them replied that they support the hypothesis H4. A medium relationship has
have already been adopted to some degree. 37 of the been evidenced between the ”Cost”, ”Performance”, and
participants responded about the market scope of their ”Security” factors and ”Cloud Adoption” (hypotheses H2,
organizations. 64% of them (24) work in organizations H6, H7). The correlation coeficient of H7 has a negative
that ofer ofshore services (international). Due to this, value, security concerns play a hindering role in cloud
we checked the adoption level in regards to the respec- adoption in Albania. This is in the same line with other
tive market scope (Table 2). As expected, the level of works that have investigated this [
This might explain the fact that privacy was not shown to have an influence in the adoption based on the collected answers. Same for ”Perception / Knowledge” or ”Flexibility”. In ofshoring settings, when only the software development has been outsourced, infrastructure related decisions might have been made beforehand.
Also most of the participants work in the banking, telco, and marketing industries. Further studies need to investigate the level of adoption in startups other small and medium enterprises. Interesting insights may be also gathered when surveying not technical business actors similarly to the work reported from [14].
Cloud technologies are known of various benefits that have made possible many modern information systems. Even though this has been proven from many years of success stories and huge investments from cloud providers, they are is still hesitation on adopting them, particularly in developing countries.
investigating influencing factors of cloud adoption in Albania. In the same line with many previous studies, a questionnaire was conducted with 71 participants from the Albanian information technology community.
Results showed a strong positive correlation between ”Availability” and ”Adoption”, while a medium positive correlation with the latest was noticed for ”Cost” and ”Performance”. Similarly to other studies it was shown that ”Security” has a negative correlation (hinders) with ”Adoption”. We used Spearman’s rank correlation with a significance level of 0.5. As it is usual with other inferential statistics checks, correlation doesn’t definitively mean that there’s a causative relation between the factors in question, however tend to show that a relation within them exists.
Our findings also were in the same line with
previous cloud adoption investigations targeting the Albanian
market [
As a limitation, the survey participants were mostly software developers and many of them work in companies that have an international market scope (the systems under development are not located in Albania). Further studies are needed to improve insights on organizational and environmental influencing factors (local scope).
In conclusion, the empirical findings of our study can serve as valuable starting points for researchers and practitioners investigating cloud adoption. By highlighting both the positive and negative factors that influence adoption, our findings can help guide future investigations and inform decision-making in this area.
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