Cloud-based technology for small and medium scale enterprises: a decision-making paradigm using IPA, AHP and fuzzy-AHP techniques

Abstract

Small and medium scale enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of the world economy. In today's challenging and dynamic business environment, popularly referred to as VUCA short for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, SMEs need to continually adapt and adopt technological solutions to stay competitive. Cloud computing is a disruptive information and communication technology (ICT) tool, which can be leveraged by SMEs for this purpose. However widespread adoption of cloud computing in SMEs is elusive. In this paper, we analyse the attributes that influence the adoption of cloud computing in SMEs using techniques like importance performance analysis (IPA), analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and fuzzy-AHP. IPA technique is used to identify the areas of improvement for service providers as also improve their efficiency. AHP technique has been used to rank different attributes of the technology in the order of preference from an SME's perspective. Both results are studied conjointly thereby re-iterating the importance of certain attributes of the technology so as to help managers devise strategies to increase the adoption of cloud-based technologies.