Cloud Computing in the Palestinian IT Sector
Samaher Dureidi, Samer Zein · 2021 International Conference on Electrical, Computer and Energy Technologies (ICECET) · 2021
Cloud Computing is a paradigm that refers to resources, services, infrastructure, and various applications available on demand through the internet, based on pay-per-use business model, without the need to have local resources. Thus, transfer from locally installed applications to internet-based services. Palestinian IT sector is a young and improving sector and cloud computing plays a major contribution in it. Multiple studies can be found in the literature discussing adoption factors and challenges of cloud computing in general. However, little work is available to investigate cloud computing adoption factors and challenges in the Palestinian software development companies. In this research we attempt to evaluate the cloud computing status in the Palestinian software development companies; identify the factors that affect software development companies' intention to adopt cloud computing; and to determine the challenges of applying cloud computing in IT sector. We conducted a qualitative study; developers from eight Palestinian software companies were interviewed, followed by a questionnaire based survey, with 35 respondents from IT sector. The results suggest that cloud computing is widely adopted in the Palestinian development firms, it also shows that the main motivations and cloud adoption factors in the Palestinian development companies are: hardware and software cost savings, time saving, effort and management, availability, achieve greater scalability, flexibility and productivity. Furthermore, the study identifies challenges that face the Palestinian software development companies such as security issues, privacy, technical issues and lack of cloud experts.