Challenging Dropbox: The Adoption and Usage of New Cloud Storage Service "sciebo" at German Universities

Rudolph, D., Vogl, R., Angenent, A., Thoring, A., Wilmer, A., Schild, S.

Zusammenfassung

As reported at EUNIS 2015, a large academic cloud storage service was launched in the beginning of 2015 by the majority of the public research and applied science universities in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) under the brand name "sciebo". One year after the start, we will examine if the predictions made in the preparatory project phase on system performance and on service adoption based on the well-known diffusion model by Rogers apply to reality. This is the first study about the adoption of a specific cloud service at several universities. We identify two factors affecting the speed of diffusion: share of technophiles and the use of marketing measures. Organization size does not seem to influence the speed of diffusion. Regarding system performance and availability, one year of operation shows that the agreed on targets were met.