Strategic Management of Cloud Computing Services: Focusing on Consumer Adoption Behavior

The emergence of cloud computing services has led to an increased interest in the technology among the general public and enterprises marketing these services. Although there is a need for studies with a managerial relevance for this emerging market, the lack of market analysis hampers such investigations. Therefore, this study focuses on the end-user market for cloud computing in Korea. We conduct a quantitative analysis to show consumer adoption behavior for these services, particularly infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Bayesian mixed logit model and the multivariate probit model are used to analyze the data collected by a conjoint survey. From this analysis, we find that the service fee and stability are the most critical adoption factors. We also present an analysis on the relationship between terminal devices and IaaS, classified by core attributes such as price, stability, and storage capacity. From these relationships, we find that larger storage capacity is more important for mobile devices such as laptops than desktops. Based on the results of the analysis, this study also recommends useful strategies to enable enterprise managers to focus on more appropriate service attributes, and to target suitable terminal device markets matching the features of the service.