Factors that influence cloud adoption in the public sector: The case of an emerging economy—Thailand

The use of information and communications technology (ICT) can improve business competitiveness and provide competitive advantages for organisations—from small to large enterprises. The public sector is even investigating whether cloud-based services can transform its ICT infrastructure to not only reduce costs but also ease maintenance, support and upgradeability. This study aims to analyse the order of important factors influencing cloud adoption and examine the group of causal relationships among the factors influencing cloud adoption in Thailand’s public sector. The data were collected quantitatively through self-administered questionnaires, randomly distributed to 210 sample respondents who had previously used the government cloud service. Then, 16 experts were consulted to determine the degree of direct influence between two factors in the scales of 0 and 4 through a pairwise comparison using purposive sampling. Assurance was identified as the most significant factor, which is also a significant causal factor, and flexibility as the least important one that influence cloud adoption in Thailand’s public sector. Moreover, the key criteria for each factor were identified, and the impact relation maps were obtained. This study contributes to the literature on cloud adoption, provides future research directions and includes suggestions that could help managers and policymakers develop better cloud service platforms for Thailand’s public sector.