Firm Characteristics and Propensity for Cloud Computing Adoption

Cloud Computing (CC) is emerging as a new paradigm of providing IT support of firms' processes and activities, which has a great potential to offer important benefits, but at the same time firms perceive that it poses some risks as well. Its adoption by firms has been lower than the initial expectations. So it is quite important to conduct research on its adoption by firms and identify factors that affect it positively or negatively. Our study makes a contribution in this direction by empirically investigating and comparing the effects of a wide range of firm characteristics, which concern firm's strategy, processes, technology, personnel on the propensity to adopt CC. Its theoretical foundation the Leavitt's Diamond framework. It has been based on a dataset collected through the e-Business W@tch Survey of the European Commission from 676 European firms from the glass, ceramic, cement and sectors. Our findings provide interesting insights as to the kind of firms for which the CC is perceived as more appropriate and beneficial.