EXPLORING USERS' ATTITUDES AND INTENTIONS TOWARD THE ADOPTION OF CLOUD COMPUTING IN SAUDI ARABIA: AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION

Over the past few years, cloud computing has evolved as one of the major advances in the field of Information Technology (IT) utilizing third-party services. Therefore, trust in cloud vendors as well as the determination of potential risks, such as privacy and security issues, are crucial for ensuring the successful adoption of an appropriate cloud. Prior research have addressed the technical aspects of cloud-based environments, such as cloud virtualization, scalability and security. Nevertheless, it is argued that the biggest obstacle of cloud computing is not technological, rather it is perceptual or attitudinal. The adoption of cloud computing has been central to several scholarly research areas, particularly user acceptance. This study presents an extended Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), which integrates Trust (TR), Anxiety (ANX) and Perceived Risk (PR), to investigate users' attitudes and intentions toward the adoption of cloud computing. The proposed model was empirically examined using the Structural Equation Model (SEM) to analyze data gathered by a survey of both IT professionals and end users. The results herein suggested that trust, anxiety and PR can be successfully integrated within the TAMs. Trust has demonstrated to have a strong positive influence on Perceived Ease of Use (PEOU), but it had no significant effects on Perceived Usefulness (PU). Both anxiety and PR were found to have significant negative effects on PEOU and PU. In addition, Behavioral Intention (BI) to use the cloud can be predicted by trust, attitudes and PU, as PR was shown to have no significant effect on BI. The proposed model, including PR, trust and anxiety, has been demonstrated to be a true predictor of user intentions, toward the use of cloud computing, within the context of Saudi Arabia.