USAGE OF CLOUD SERVICES
A Survey for Consumers in USA, Japan and Finland
Kaarina Karppinen, Kaisa Koskela and Timo Koivumäki
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Kaitoväylä 1, 90570 Oulu, Finland
Keywords: Cloud services, End users, Consumer behaviour, Quantitative method.
Abstract: The purpose of this study is to examine how commonly cloud services are used by consumers around the
world and to discover possible differences in cloud service usage within various countries. An online survey
was conducted in three countries (Finland, USA and Japan) with more than 3000 respondents. The results
show that almost all respondents have used at least some cloud services but the Japanese use them
substantially less than the Americans or the Finns. From the five cloud service categories examined in the
survey, webmail services are the most commonly used by 91 percent of the respondents. Out of all cloud
service examples in our survey Youtube is the most popular one.
1 INTRODUCTION
Cloud is one of the main global trends washing
through the ICT industry (Dikaiakos et al., 2009,
Hayes, 2008, Kim et al., 2009). In addition to wide-
spread use of cloud services within industrial
sectors, they are also today’s reality in consumers’
life; typical web users use cloud services daily
whether they know it or not. However, majority of
current research on cloud services takes the industry
or business to business (B2B) perspective. This
paper contributes to the less studied, but equally
important, area of cloud service research – consumer
behaviour.
The usage of cloud services is a very global
phenomenon; hence, for capturing a comprehensive
picture of the current situation, an international
sample of end users is a necessity. We conducted a
large web-based survey in three countries (Finland,
USA and Japan) in order to understand how cloud
services in general as well as individual cloud
services have penetrated different markets and what
kind of critical differences these markets have which
the service providers should be aware of.
The paper is structured as follows: Section 2
gives background to cloud services, while Section 3
briefly describes the research design behind the
study. Section 4 provides the results and analysis of
the study. Finally, Section 5 summarizes the study
results as well as discusses about the further work.
2 CLOUD SERVICES
Several definitions for cloud computing and cloud
services exist. Weiss (2007) states that with cloud
computing software functionality, hardware
computing power, and other computing resources
are delivered in the form of service so that they
become available widely to consumers.
According to (Kim et al., 2009, Naone, 2007,
Hoover and Martin, 2008), cloud computing
includes the Internet access to computing resources
that are administered remotely and are dynamically
allocated and deallocated according to the needs of
the users and being paid by the actual use of these
resources. Kim et al. (2009) continues that services
such as free email services, Internet portal services,
web hosting services, computing infrastructure
services, etc. are all cloud services that predate the
coining of the term cloud computing.
NIST (2009) defines cloud services from the
consumers’ perspective as follows: “The capability
provided to the consumer to use the provider’s
applications running on a cloud infrastructure. The
applications are accessible from various client
devices through a thin client interface such as a web
browser (e.g., web-based email). The consumer does
not manage or control the underlying cloud
infrastructure including network, servers, operating
systems, storage, or even individual application
305
Karppinen K., Koskela K. and Koivumäki T..
USAGE OF CLOUD SERVICES - A Survey for Consumers in USA, Japan and Finland.
DOI: 10.5220/0003388203050308
In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER-2011), pages 305-308
ISBN: 978-989-8425-52-2
Copyright
c
2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
capabilities, with the possible exception of limited
user-specific application configuration settings.”
Most of the definitions presented in the literature
are quite technical in nature and challenging for an
average end user to understand easily. In order to
make sure that the survey respondents understood
the basics of the cloud phenomenon and were able to
identify some concrete examples of cloud based
services we constructed the following, simple, cloud
service definition which was presented at the survey:
“In cloud services, content (for example, music,
email, files), personal information and programs are
stored on Internet servers instead of the user’s own
computer. The cloud services and the content in
them are accessible from various devices anytime
and anywhere through the Internet.
For example Gmail (emails are stored on an
Internet server instead of user’s own computer),
Spotify (almost unlimited music libraries can be
accessed through the Internet), and Facebook
(personal information, photos, games, etc. are
shared with other Facebook users in the Internet)
can be defined as cloud services.”
3 RESEARCH DESIGN
As the target of the study was to examine how
people in different countries use cloud services, a
broad and representative sample of end users in
several countries was needed. Hence, a quantitative
research approach was used. A web-based survey
was chosen as the data collection method due to its
several advantages e.g. flexibility to create more
complicated surveys, the fast speed of recruitment
and no travel cost needed (Kumar et al. 2002). The
survey was conducted in three countries; Finland,
Japan and USA. These three countries were chosen
as they all can be identified as past or current
pacesetters in many ICT fields and as they represent
very different cultural backgrounds and geographical
areas of the world.
We received a total of 3187 responses, between
the time period of 10 June and 21 June 2010. There
were 1005 respondents from Finland, 1089 from
USA and 1093 from Japan. The analysis was made
using SPSS Statistics 17.0 computer software.
4 USAGE OF CLOUD SERVICES
The results of the survey show that as much as 97
percent of the respondents use cloud services. When
comparing the three countries, the cross-tabulation
reveals (χ2 = 74,591, p = 0,000) that the usage of
cloud services is significantly lower in Japan (93,8
%) than in the two other countries (USA 99,3 % and
Finland 98,8 %).
According to the survey the most popular cloud
service is Youtube, used by 65 % of the respondents.
Youtube is followed by YahooMail (49 %) and the
third place goes to Facebook (44 %). More than
every third of the respondents have also used Gmail
and Hotmail services. For more information see
Figure 1.
23 %
23 %
23 %
65 %
49 %
44 %
37 %
36 %
15 %
16 %
0 %
10 %
20 %
30 %
40 %
50 %
60 %
70 %
You
Tu
be
YahooMail
Fac
e
bo
ok
Gmai
l
Win
Li
v
eHot
ma
il
i
Tun
es
Norto
n
360
Skype
T
w
it
te
r
M
y
Spa
c
e
Figure 1: Ten most commonly used cloud services.
4.1 Usage Divided by Cloud Service
Categories
In the survey individual cloud services were divided
in five different categories: 1. Webmail, 2. Social
networking services, 3. Online media, 4. Online
sharing and storage and 5. Online security. From
these five cloud service categories, webmail services
are the most commonly used, by 91 percent of the
respondents. Webmail services are followed by
online media services, which have been used by 74
percent the respondents. Almost two thirds (64 %) of
the respondents have used various social networking
services and every other (48 %) respondent have
used online security services. Online sharing and
storage services are used by 30 percent of the
respondents.
When comparing the three countries, it is again
notable that USA has the highest usage percentage
in four out of five categories, closely followed by
Finland (for more information see Figure 2). Apart
from webmail services, there is a considerable
CLOSER 2011 - International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science
306
difference when comparing usage percentages of
Japanese respondents to the other two countries; it
seems that cloud services have not yet broken
through in Japan as broadly as in USA and Finland
(p = 0,000).
0
20
40
60
80
100
Percents (%)
USA
96,2 80,1 78,6 44,2 60,1
FIN
91,1 76,7 80,7 33,8 58,5
JPN
86,6 37,0 62,6 12,1 26,5
Webma
il
Social
network
Online
media
Online
sharing
Online
security
Figure 2: Usage of cloud services divided by categories
and countries.
4.2 Respondents’ Prior Knowledge
about Cloud Services
Out of all the respondents less than 20 percent had
actually heard the term cloud service prior to the
survey. Over 70 percent of the respondents had not
heard the term and 12 percent were not sure whether
they had heard it or not. Hence, even though most of
the respondents use cloud services quite regularly
the term itself is quite unknown among the users.
Out of those people who reported to having heard
the term before, slightly more than 60 percent
indicated knowing the meaning of the term, 13 %
did not know it and 25 % were not sure.
When comparing the answers from different
countries with cross-tabulations and chi-square tests,
significant differences were found. From Table 1 we
can see that only less than 14 percent of the Finnish
respondents had heard the term, while the
corresponding numbers in USA and Japan are close
or slightly over 20 percent (χ2 = 261,635, p =
0,000). One conclusion that could be drawn from
this is that the term ”cloud service” has been longer
in use in USA and Japan and already gotten a buzz
words status, whereas in Finland the term is only
just starting to get a firmer ground.
While only 64 and 56 percent of the US and
Japanese respondents who had heard the term also
reported knowing its meaning (χ2 = 22,289, p =
0,000), interestingly over 70 % of the respondents in
Finland claimed to be familiar with also the meaning
of the term. Significant differences are also apparent
when genders regardless of the citizenship are
compared; 27 percent of the male respondents had
heard the term cloud service before opposed to only
9 percent of the women (χ2 = 203,543, p = 0,000).
From the respondents who had heard the term, two
out of three males knew what it means, while only
slightly over half of the women reported knowing
the meaning (χ2 = 8,446, p = 0,015).
When examining the differences between various
age groups it can be noted that middle-aged users
(age group 35-44 years) had come across (22 %)
with the term most, while less than one of every
sixth respondent in the youngest and the oldest age
groups (15-24, 55-64 and over 65 years) had heard
the term before. Out of the respondents who had
heard the term cloud service before, the age group of
45-55 years had the most confident knowledge (69
%) about the meaning of the term. Again, the people
in the oldest age group (over 65 years) were the
most uncertain about the term’s meaning, with only
42 percent of the respondents answering that they
actually know what the term cloud service means.
Table 1: Percentages of the respondents having heard the
term “cloud service” divided by countries.
Have you heard the term “cloud service” before?
USA FIN JPN
Yes 18,5 % 13,7 % 20,9 %
No 76,4 % 80,1 % 55,8 %
Not sure 5,1 % 6,2 % 23,3 %
4.3 Respondents’ Expertise in Cloud
Services
The respondents were also asked to evaluate their
knowledge and usage of cloud services. Out of all of
the respondents even as much as slightly over 70
percent report being novice users, while only 24
percent consider themselves to be intermediate users
and only four percent to be advanced users.
Again, when comparing the answers of the
respondents from different countries with cross-
tabulations and chi-square tests, significant
differences are found (χ2 = 140,614, p = 0,015).
Clearly, the highest amount of people considering
themselves to be advanced users of cloud services
are found in Finland (7 %), compared with USA (4
%) and Japan (1 %). As many as every third Finn
felt that they are intermediate users, when only every
fourth American and every sixth Japanese
considered themselves to be as experienced. Notable
USAGE OF CLOUD SERVICES - A Survey for Consumers in USA, Japan and Finland
307
is that in Japan over 80 % of the respondents
considered themselves to be novice users.
Results also show that males consider
significantly more often themselves to be advanced
users and females respectively feel more insecure
about their knowledge (χ2 = 67,327, p = 0,000).
When looking more closely at the differences
between the age groups, surprising is that the
youngest age group (15-24) is the highest one to
think themselves to be advanced users (χ2 =
147,941, p = 0,000), even when they do not report
their knowledge of the term itself and its meaning to
be very high. This may reflect that even though
many young people had not heard the cloud service
term before, after reading the definition of the term
they realized that they actually had used those
services a lot without knowing the term before.
5 CONCLUSIONS
The purpose of this study was to examine how
commonly cloud services are used by consumers in
USA, Japan and Finland, and to discover possible
differences within these countries. The results of our
study show that the usage of cloud services is very
common. However, apart from webmail services,
there is a considerable difference when comparing
the cloud service usage percentages between the
three countries; cloud services have not yet broken
through in Japan as broadly as in USA and Finland.
The survey also revealed that only four percent
of the users evaluate themselves as advanced users.
Every fourth person consider themselves to be
intermediate users, while novice users dominate the
market with more than 70 percent’s share.
All in all the results indicate that cloud services
have already penetrated into consumer markets,
despite the fact that the term “cloud service” itself is
still relatively unknown. This indicates that
consumers are not very interested in how a service is
provided to them as long as it provides sufficient
value. For consumers, the challenges related to
adoption of cloud services found in industrial
studies, such as security and service reliability, do
not seem to be important enough to prevent the
adoption and use of the services.
The study results, showing that consumer cloud
service markets appear to have reached the wide
spread adoption phase, present good opportunities
for companies in cloud service business. In USA and
Finland, webmail, social networking and online
media services are already in high demand. In Japan,
there still are some challenges related to the
adoption of social networking services as well as
online sharing and storage services.
The results of demographic analyses indicate that
perhaps the best way to further fuel the existing
cloud service markets is to increase the female
consumers’ and older age segments’ awareness of
cloud services. The most efficient ways to increase
awareness in different consumer segments is an
important issue which calls for further investigation.
It would also be interesting to conduct this type of
extensive consumer studies on cloud service use in
other countries to get a wider understanding of
global consumer markets for cloud services.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This study was carried out in Cloud Software
Program launched by Finnish Strategic Centre for
Science, Technology and Innovation TIVIT Plc and
conducted together with F-Secure. We thank both of
these parties for their support.
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