the usage of personal cloud storage by ...

International Journal of Information Technology and Business Management 29th May 2017. Vol.59 No.1 © 2012-2017 JITBM & ARF. All rights reserved

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THE USAGE OF PERSONAL CLOUD STORAGE BY ACADEMICIAN IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES (OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES) 1

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Arwa Y. Aleryani, 2Samah A. Alariki, 3Halima Mofleh Saba University, Yemen, 2Yemenia University, Yemen, 3University of Science & Technology – Hodeidah, Yemen Email: [email protected]

Abstract Personal cloud storage has been started to be one of the most important tools for academic staff in the universities and educational institutes all over the world. In addition to store documents in the cloud, it gives the chance to share the documents with students and colleagues. Yemen is one of the least developed countries, suffering from many problems which can be challenging for efficient use of the internet and its tools and services. This paper attempts to investigate the opportunities and challenges when using personal cloud storage by academic staff of universities in Yemen and abroad. The impact of age, gender, graduated place, specialization and current living place on the usage of personal cloud storage has been also addressed in this paper. The results showed that personal cloud storage is still not well used among many Yemeni academic staff. More than (77.8%) of the respondents do not know about them, although some of them are thinking to use them in future. The opportunities of using personal cloud storage are still limited.

Keyword: personal cloud storage, Yemeni academic staff, Opportunities, Challenges space, it is to be expected that cloud storage will soon generate a high amount of internet traffic [5]. Drop box, Google Drive, and icloud are examples of personal cloud storage. The next wave of the personal cloud will be shaped by two key trends; the first increased access to personal information and second increased intelligence applied to the user experience and against the user's information [8].

1. INTRODUCTION Cloud Storage is a part of a wider definition called ‘Cloud Computing’. Cloud computing as defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is “a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) [12]. Cloud data storage technology is the core area in cloud computing and solves the data storage mode of cloud environment [12]. The cloud computing is the best solution for all educational institutes and universities [1], [14]. The usage of the cloud has been increased recently; many users and IT managers are getting very excited about the potential benefits of cloud storage. They are being able to store and manipulate data in the cloud and capitalizing on the potential of higherperformance, more scalable, and cheaper storage [12], [14]. Personal cloud storage services are gaining popularity. With a rush of providers to enter the market and an increasing offer of cheap storage

1. LITERATURE REVIEW Alharthi [2] studied cloud computing in higher education. They indicated that cloud storage is still in its beginning compared to other businesses. However, over time it will continually grow. The adoption of cloud computing may help universities to focus more on their main goals which are related to teaching and learning and eliminate expenditure. Students and academic staff can rapidly and costeffectively access various application platforms and

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pool of resources on-demand. The authors proposed an integrated reference model based on the challenges in the literature integrated with TAM model to investigate the factors influence the users’ attitudes and behaviors toward using cloud education services in universities ICT provision.

performance metrics under different workloads. The effectiveness of the methodology was shown in a case study in which 11 services are compared under the same conditions. The case study revealed interesting differences in design choices. Their implications were assessed in a series of benchmarks. Results show no clear winner, with all services having the potential for improving performance. In some scenarios, the synchronization of the same files can take 20 times longer. In other cases, they observed wastage of twice as much network capacity, questioning the design of some services. Their methodology and results were thus useful both as benchmarks and as guidelines for system design. Definition of Personal Cloud Storage

Drogo [6] presented in their paper a methodology to check both capabilities and system design of personal cloud storage services. They evaluated the inferences of design choices on performance by analyzing five services. The analysis shows the relevance of client capabilities and protocol design to personal cloud storage services. Dropbox implements most of the checked capabilities, and its client clearly increases performance, although some protocol seems possible to reduce network overhead. On the other, the analysis shows that Cloud Drive bandwidth wastage is an order of amount higher than other offerings, and its lack of client capabilities results in performance bottlenecks. SkyDrive shows some performance limitations, while Wuala generally performs well. More importantly, Wuala deploys client side encryption, and this feature does not seem to affect Wuala management performance [6].

Cloud storage is a system that provides functions such as data storage and business access [13]. It is a model of data storage in which the digital data is stored in three types; logical pools, the physical storage spans multiple servers (and often locations), and the physical environment is typically owned and managed by a hosting company [4]. These cloud storage providers are responsible for keeping the data available and accessible, and the physical environment protected and running. People and organizations buy or lease storage capacity from the providers to store user, organization, or application data.

Moktar [15] studied the cloud computing in cadmic institutions. He and his co-authors indicated that cloud computing is a new technology in the world of IT with emerged recently and began to spread rapidly. They highlighted the implications of cloud computing in academic institutions. In their paper, they presented the cloud computing paradigm, historical view, concept, layers, types and the characteristics. During reviewing of many instances of using cloud computing in academic institutions, they provided the factors that affect the adoption of cloud computing in the academic institutions. Successful transition to cloud computing in academic institutions depends on a good definition for transition strategies. They provided suggestion for transition strategies into cloud computing in academic Institutions

Personal cloud is a collection of digital content and services, which are accessible from any device. The personal cloud is not a tangible entity [16]. It is a place that gives users the ability to store, synchronize, stream and share content on a relative core, moving from one platform, screen, and location to another. Created on connected services and applications, it reflects and sets consumers’ expectations for how next-generation computing services will work. They also define as a form of cloud storage that applies to storing an individual’s data in the cloud and providing the individual with access to the data from anywhere. Personal cloud storage also often enables synchronizing and sharing stored data across multiple devices such as mobile phones and tablet computers.

Bocchi [3] studied personal cloud storage benchmarks and comparison. He and his co-authors showed the new methodology to understand and benchmark personal cloud storage services. Their methodology unveils their architecture and capabilities. Moreover, by means of repeatable and customizable tests, it allows the measurement of

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Opportunities of Personal Cloud Storage

Challenges of Personal Cloud Storage

The personal cloud storage provides an ideal solution for the secure sharing of computing and storage resources across peers in a resource and application agnostic manner and facilitates new computational paradigms such as datacenter-less, distributed virtual clouds [10]. For some computer owners, finding enough storage space to hold all the data they have, become a real challenge. Some people invest in larger hard drives, others prefer external storage devices like thumb drives or compact discs. Some computer owners might delete entire folders worth of old files in order to make space for new information. Some are moving to a growing trend, that is cloud storage [12.]. It really refers to saving data to an off-site storage system maintained by a third party. Cloud storage has several advantages over traditional data storage. Store data on a cloud storage system will enable to get to that data from any location that has internet access. No need to carry around a physical storage device or use the same computer to save and retrieve information. With the right storage system, other people will be allowed to access the data, turning a personal project into a cooperative effort [12].

There are some challenges when using cloud storage [12]. Once the data arrives at the cloud, it is decrypted and stored, the challenge is the encrypt. Is it has to be done prior to storing? or before upload, the data for cloud storage or it is preferred that the cloud storage service automatically does it? [12]. Authentication and identity management is another challenges, many decisions have to be taken. What level of enforcement of password strength and change frequency does the service provider invoke? What is the recovery methodology for password and account name? How do passwords deliver to users upon a change? What about logs and the ability to audit access? [12]. The most important challenges that are fit on cloud storage only is the trusted service provider. It is a critical link, unlike in-house IT department, cloud storage share the responsibility with the new party. Can they demonstrate that the safeguards they claim are indeed delivered? What is their record? [12]. Dropbox has some challenges like the lowest amount of free storage of the offerings reviewed in this document. In addition, when inviting users to share files/folders, the email invitation must be sent to the email address that is associated with the users’ Dropbox account [7]. The challenges of Google Drive like haring not as easy and intuitive as Dropbox—must use the Google Drive web application to set it up. Also no ability to set references on syncing speed [9].

Dropbox gives users the capability of sharing entire folders with other Dropbox account users, which allows updates to be viewable by all collaborators. It has many advantages such as primarily in its ease of use, very intuitive interface and recovers deleted files in Dropbox easier than some other options [7]. Google Drive has built‐ in document editor so that programs such as Microsoft Word are not required to be installed on the computer in order to edit the document. Also, allows comments to be left on any files stored. In the other hand , iCloud is a suite of free cloud-based services from Apple that helps users store and synchronize digital content across computers and numerous iOS-supported devices such as iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches [11], [9].

2. RESEARCH MITHODOLOGY This study was carried out by using a web-based online questionnaire created through Google Forms. The authors preferred to use questionnaire because it is the most suitable quantitative method for obtaining data from a representative sample of people. The respondents were all Yemeni academic staff who are working at universities in Yemen and abroad. The sample covered all Yemeni universities (public and private). The sample included all ages, gender, education level, the place of studying or graduated, current location place of living and finally all university specializations.

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The questionnaire was designed to collect information for four main factors. The first one was about the demographic characteristic, the second one was about the knowledge of this personal cloud storage, the third one was about the benefits and opportunities of these storages and the last factor was about the problems and challenges in using personal cloud storage. In addition, the research aims to discover which documents do academic staff store and how often they access their storage. The questions under each factor were obtained from the above literature review and from the authors' own experience. The questionnaire was distributed to three groups of Yemeni academicians on Facebook and to 20 of relevant known academicians.

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3. 4. 5.

The challenges and problems of personal cloud storage that Yemeni academic staff face. The impact of gender and age on using personal cloud storage. The impact of level of study/ field of study on using personal cloud storage The impact of place of studying/living on using personal cloud storage.

3. RESEARCH SIGNIFICANCE Personal cloud storage is still new tools especially in the context of Yemeni academic staff. From this point, our research contributes to the knowledge to conduct this new area of interest. Our research spots the light to this vital personal cloud storage for the Yemeni academic staff to see how they use it and what are the challenges they face. Moreover, our research might encourage Yemeni academic staff to make use of new technology developments. In addition, they can understand how these storages can improve their work with more protection and sharing.

Research questions The present research aims to find answers to the following questions:1. How many Yemeni academic staff do use personal cloud storage? 2. How do they get benefit from personal cloud storage? 3. What are the challenges and problems they face with personal cloud storage? 4. Do gender and age affect the way Yemeni academic staff use personal cloud storage? 5. Do the level of education/and field of study affect the way that the Yemeni academic staff dealing with personal cloud storage? 6. Does the place where they studied/live affect the way Yemeni academic staff deal with personal cloud storage?

4. FINDING ANALYSIS Yemen is one of least developed countries. Yemen suffers from many problems that are beyond the topic of this paper. One of these problems is related to the internet and economic problems, which might affect the usage of new technology by Yemeni academic staff. Our sample included Yemeni academic staff who are working in universities either in Yemen or outside Yemen.

Research goals The research aims to explore the following issues: 1. The opportunities and benefits of personal cloud storage from Yemeni academic staff point of view

Table1: Demographic characteristics and the usage of PCS

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Demographic characteristics of respondents Demographic characteristics

Age

Gender

Education level

No

Percentage

25 – 34

18

24%

35 – 44

34

45.3%

45 – 54

14

18.7%

Over 55

9

12%

Total

75

Male

43

57.3%

Female

32

42.7%

Total

75

Postdoc

16

PhD

36

MSc Total Yemen

University of last/curren t study

Arab International Total

Your current location

Specialize

Yemen Abroad Total Applied sciences (IT, Engineering , Health …) Social sciences and humanities Total

23 75 17 31 27 75 42 33

21.3% 48% 30.7%

22.7% 41.3% 36% 56% 44%

The impact of Demographic characteristics on the usage of PCS Using PC 17 (94%)

Not using PCS 1 (think about using) 0 (not think about using)

24 (71%) 11 (79%) 6 (67%)

8 (think about using) 2 (not think about using) 2 (think about using) 1 (not think about using) 3 (think about using) 0 (not think about using)

38 (88%) 21 (65%)

3 (think about using) 2 (not think about using) 12 (think about using) 1 (not think about using)

15 (94%) 25 (69%) 19 (82%)

1 (think about using) 0 (not think about using) 11(think about using) 2 (not think about using) 4(think about using) 0 (not think about using)

13 (76%) 22 (71%) 22 (81%)

4 (think about using) 0 (not think about using) 8 (think about using) 1 (not think about using) 3 (think about using) 2 (not think about using)

28 (67%) 29 (88%)

13 (think about using) 1(not think about using) 2 (think about using) 2 (not think about using)

75 50

66.7%

42 (84%)

6 (think about using) 2 (not think about using)

25

33.3%

15 (60%)

9 (think about using) 1 (not think about using)

75 Total of respondents =( 75)

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Table 1. presents the research sample with its characteristics and the impact of them on the usage of personal cloud storage. It presents two parts. First, it gives a brief information of the respondents’ characteristics . Second, it gives the view of the impact of the demographic characteristics on personal cloud storage usage.

The gender factor showed that male respondents are using personal cloud storage more than female ones. Where 38 out of 43 male respondents are using personal cloud storages that constitutes 88% of them are using personal cloud storages. There are 21 of 32 of females are using personal cloud storages, that constitutes 65% of them using personal cloud storages. On the other hand, female showed positive result in the intending to use personal cloud This result is expected because in Yemen males used to have more chance to use technology and to develop themselves.

Demographic characteristics of respondents’ analysis Table 1. shows that there were 75 respondents participated in this study. The results shown in Table 1. indicate that 45.3% of the respondents were at the age range between 35 and 44. The male respondents were 43 (57.3%) whereas female respondents were 32 (42.7%). According to the level of the educations, 48% were with Ph.D. degree. About 41.3% graduated or still studying from Arab universities. (56%) of the respondents were in Yemen at the time of doing this research. Finally, 66.7% of the respondents were from applied science area.

The level of education showed that 15 out of 16 respondents who have Postdoc are using personal cloud storages that constitutes 94% of them using personal cloud storages. Moreover, 19 of 23 respondents who have MSc are using cloud storages, that constitutes 82% of them are using personal cloud storages. Most of the non-using respondents to all level of education showed positive results in intending to use personal cloud storage according.

The impact of Demographic characteristics on the usage of PCS (The usage and intend to use analysis)

The respondents graduated or studying from international university showed positive result on the usage of personal cloud storages. There are 22 out of 27 of them using personal cloud storages, constitutes 81% of them using personal cloud storages. It could be due to the international universities culture that encourage their students to use technology.

In this part of data analysis, we are going to explore the impact of demographic characteristics on two dimensions the usage of personal cloud storages and the intending(thinking) to usage. Data have been obtained from the Excel file that was created from the Google forms designed for this research. Then we used sorting and filtering features based on required data to record how many respondents using personal cloud storages and how many intending to use according to each of the demographics characteristics in our study.

The current location affects the usage of personal cloud storage, where the respondents are living abroad showed positive results in usage, 29 out of 33 of the respondents who are living abroad are using personal could storages, constitutes 88% of them using personal cloud storages. In the same time, the respondents living in Yemen showed good results in intending to use as shown in Table 1.

As shown in Table 1, there are 17 out of 18 respondents whose ages are from 25 – 34 reported that they are using personal cloud storages. This constitutes around 94% of them are using one or more of these storages. In the other hand, 67% of the respondents whose ages were over 55 using personal cloud storage. This indicates that younger academic staff are most likely to use personal cloud storages. This show that the age factor affects the usage of these storages.

There are 42 of 50 of respondents from applied sciences are using personal cloud storages, constitutes 84% of them using personal cloud storages. In fact, it was expected that respondents from applied science field would show a higher percentage than the one they got. This expectation due to their good background on technology. Finally, there are 15 of 25 of the respondents from social sciences and humanities studies are using personal cloud storages, that constitutes 60% of them are using

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personal cloud storages. Nevertheless, they showed good result with intending to use.

(see Figure 3). In the other hand, most of the respondents indicated that they are thinking to use personal cloud storage. From our point of view, most of the Yemeni academic staff do not use personal could storage because the benefits of these storages are still fuzzy for them.

To conclude these results, we can come to fact that most of the Yemeni academic staff still do not use personal cloud storage. There are some respondents reported that they have never heard about it at all

Fact finding analysis Which personal cloud storage respondents use in work?

Figure 1. Which personal cloud storage respondents use in work?

Figure 1. showed that 65.3 % of Yemeni academic staff use Google drive as cloud storage in their work. However, those who have never used personal cloud

storage, (7.3%) of them thinking to use one of them in future.

What is the problem in personal cloud storage?

Figure 2. Problems face respondents in personal cloud storage? Figure 2. shows that the main problem in personal cloud storage that faces Yemeni academic staff is the limitation of the space. There is 49.1% of them reported this problem. The other problem is the internet connection that is not available most of the time. There is 43.9% of them face this problem. Nearly to 12.3% of respondents think it is waste of

time and 8.8% of them find it is not easy to use. In addition, 17.5% of respondents recorded that they do not trust personal cloud storage and think they are not safe.

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Why do you not use personal cloud storage?

Figure 3. Reasons behind not using personal cloud storage. Figure 3. presents the main reasons why some of the respondents do not use the personal cloud storage. 77.8% of the respondents who have not used personal cloud storage reported that simply because they have

no idea about them. The internet connection is the second problem of not using personal cloud storage, where 22.2% of respondents reported that.

Why do respondents use personal cloud storage?

Figure 4. Benefits of using personal cloud storage. Figure 4. shows the most important benefits of using personal cloud storage from point of view of the respondents. 87.9% of academic staff benefit from personal cloud storage to access their documents from anywhere. In addition, 72.4% of them benefits from personal cloud storage to store their documents in the cloud and protect them from losing or damage.

Although sharing documents with their colleagues and student is the one of the main opportunity from this storage, only 50% of respondents benefits from this option. In general, we can say that the respondents who use personal cloud storage benefit from them in a good manner.

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Which document do respondent store in personal cloud storage?

Figure 5. Document stored in personal cloud storage Figure 5. shows that the documents that are stored in the personal cloud storage are the documents that need to be shared with others. Where 61% of respondents who answered to this question reported

that they store documents that they want to be shared with others. In the other hands, only .3% of respondents store all their documents.

The usage time of personal cloud storage Analysis Table.2 shows usage time of personal cloud storage Analysis

How often do you access (PCS)? 61 respondents (81%)

Some time 52.5% of them

monthly

Daily

11.5% of them

36.1% of them

Table 2. shows that the 52.5% of respondents reported that they access their personal cloud storage only some times. This indicates that the personal cloud storage is still not the main part in their usual tasks.

the impact of gender and age, level/field of studying, studying/living place on using personal cloud storage. From the analysis findings, we can conclude that personal cloud storage is still not well known among many Yemeni academic staff. More than 77.8% of the respondents do not know about them, although some of them are thinking to use them in the future. The benefits of using personal cloud storage is still the focus on storing the important documents and not all of them. Personal cloud storage is still not one of the Yemeni academic staff essential tools to use in their academic work.

5. CONCLUSION The aims of our research are to find the opportunities and benefits of personal cloud storage according to Yemeni academic staff’ point of view as well as the challenges and problems. The second aim is to find

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www.jitbm.com learning: Review”, Review Study, Saba Journal of Information Technology and Networking (SJITN), Vol. 4 no2. [2] Alharthi, A. ; Yahya F. ; Walters, R. ; Wills, G. (2015 ) ‘ An Overview of Cloud Services Adoption Challenges in Higher Education Intuitions’ Emerging Software as a Service and Analytics 2015 Workshop (ESaaSA 2015), in conjunction with CLOSER 2015, Lisbon, PT, 20 22 May 2015. Setubal, PT,SCITEPRESS111 pp, 102-109. [3] Bocchi, E. ; Drago, I. ; Mellia, M. (2015) ' Personal Cloud Storage Benchmarks and Comparison ' The European Union under the FP7 Grant n. 318627 (Integrated Project “mPlane”). [4] Cloud storage (Wikipedia) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_storage [5] Drago(a), I. ; Mellia, M. ; Munafò, M. ; Sperotto, A. ; Sadre, R. ; Pras, A. (2012) ‘Inside Dropbox: Understanding Personal Cloud Storage Services ‘ IMC;12 Proceedings of the 2012 Internet Measurement Conference pp, 481-494 [6] Drago(b), I. ; Bocchi, E. ; Mellia, M. ; Slatman, H. ; Pras, A.(2013) ‘Benchmarking Personal Cloud Storage‘‘ IMC;13 Proceedings of the 2013 Internet Measurement Conference pp, 205-212 [7] Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/features [8] Gartner: http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/31064 17 [9] Google Drive: https://www.google.com/intl/en_US/drive/st art/index.html [10] Hari, A. ; Labs, B. ; Viswanathan, R. ; Lakshmanm T.; Chang, Y. (2012) ‘The Personal Cloud-Design, Architecture and Matchmaking Algorithms for Resource Management‘ In Proc. of 2nd Usenix HotICE, Vol.1 (2012), p.384.

6. RECOMMENDATIONS Based on the findings of this study, the authors would like to provide some recommendations that can make a change in using personal cloud storage and arise their usage. 1. The Yemeni academic staff who are already using personal cloud storage should encourage their colleagues to use of one of these personal cloud storages and to achieve more benefits from them to improve their academic work. This could be done by use personal cloud storage with them to share documents and files with them to achieve their academic work. 2. The responsibility should go to the educational institutions as well. They should encourage all their academic staff to use one of these storages. In addition, they should set rules to adopt one of these storages for academic purposes. 3. In addition, our research and future research in this area of interest might be one of the spotlights on the current subject. It focuses on the importance for the Yemeni academic staff to make use of the technology to benefit from these developments.

7. Acknowledgment We would like to show our gratitude to Dr. Hassan Saleh Mahdi, assistant professor at University of Bisha (KSA) for his insightful and constructive Comments. These comments are really valuable and well respected.

References [1] Aleryani, A. ; Alaraki, S. (2016) “Cloud computing advantages over Traditional e-

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[11] icloud : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICloud [12] Jiehui, J.; Jiyi, W, ; Jianqing, F,; Zhijie, L. (2011 ) ‘A Survey on Cloud Storage‘ Journal of Computers, Vol. 6, No. 8. [13] Liu, K. ; Dong, L. (2012) ‘Research on Cloud Data Storage Technology and Its Architecture Implementation‘ 2012 International Workshop on Information and Electronics Engineering (IWIEE), pp, 133 – 137. [14] Makoza, F. (2016) ‘Cloud computing adoption in Higher Education Institutions of Malawi: An exploratory study’. Journal of Computing and ICT Research, 9, Issue.2 pp 37- 54. [15] Mokhtar, S. ; Ali, S. ; Al-Sharafi, A. ; Aborujilah, A. (2013) ‘Cloud Computing in Academic Institutions ‘, ICUIMC (IMCOM) [16] Personal Cloud (Wikipedia) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_cloud

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