The viability of cloud computing adoption in SMME´s in Namibia

Cloud computing has emerged as a new computing paradigm with the ability to provide trustworthy, customised and configurable data to any company or individual over the internet. Whilst gaining popular interest in developing countries and small, medium and micro enterprises (SMME´s), the adoption factors have for the most part been unexplored. The purpose of this paper is to examine this particular aspect in Namibia. Questionnaires, based on the Technology Adoption Model version 3, were used and specifically targeted SMME´s that have some form of ICT infrastructure. The relationships amongst the six TAM factors were tested. From the analysis it appears as if the primary reason respondents indicated for engaging with cloud computing services was to increase the flexibility and scalability of their IT resources. Reasons for not engaging with cloud services were unfamiliarity with the concept of cloud computing, unclear business models, risk of exposing corporate data, privacy concerns and high latency networks.