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

 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 %

65 %

49 %

44 %

37 %

36 %

15 %

16 %

0 %

10 %

20 %

30 %

40 %

50 %

60 %

70 %

You

YahooMail

Fac

Gmai

Win

eHot

Tun

Norto

360

Skype

Spa

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).

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

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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