FOSTERING ACADEMIC RESEARCH BY CLOUD COMPUTING - THE USERS\u27 PERSPECTIVE

The adoption of Cloud Computing (CC) is growing rapidly. However, studies on the adoption of these new technologies by individual users are rare and almost exclusively focused on the business context. This paper presents first results of a research project addressing the adoption of CC by individual researchers and small research groups in Higher Education institutions. We surveyed users of the Frankfurt Cloud, an IaaS environment provided at the Goethe University of Frankfurt that serves affiliated researchers with on-demand computing and storage resources. On the one hand, the findings indicate that users benefit from fast and easy access to computing power for their research, on the other hand, user concerns related to cloud adoption are identified, which have to be taken into account during further development of CC services for academic research