The Service Retention Model of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has shifted the paradigm of the IT service industries by offering flexible and cost-efficiency subscription-based online services. Since its advent, the adoption of cloud computing has rapidly been increased in private business as well as governmental institutions. According to IDG’s cloud computing survey (2018), 73% of organizations have at least one application or a portion of their computing infrastructure deployed in the cloud. The adoption rate has been on the rise from 51% in 2011, and so has the average cloud budget from $1.61 million in 2016 to $2.2 million in 2018 (IDG, 2018). One might think this is an opportunity for cloud computing as a research domain as well as a business model because it has enjoyed this unprecedented popularity. However, as cloud computing and relevant research have been matured, it has also posed various new challenges including sustainability, security, data management, and reliability and created the need for new approaches to study (Buyaa et al., 2018). In particular, given that cloud computing has been deployed since Amazon introduced its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in 2006 (Regalado, 2011), it is time to think about not only adoption of cloud computing but also post-adoption usage of it. With this in mind, this study is designed to examine the post-adoption use of cloud computing. Using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP, Saaty, 1980) as a framework, this study investigates the factors that might affect firms’ service retention decisions