The social representation of Cloud Computing according to Brazilian information technology professionals

Abstract

This study seeks to identify the social representation about Cloud Computing, by the perception of the Brazilian professionals of Information Technology (IT). Data were collected by administering online questionnaires to 221 IT professionals who were chosen using accessibility criteria. Social Representation Theory (SRT) was foundational in this study. We employed free evocation of words technique and the Vergès’ framework, as well as implicative, lexical, and content analysis. Analyzing the social representation of Cloud Computing yielded the following associated words: cloud, storage, availability, Internet, virtualization, and security. These results show that Brazilian IT professionals have a primarily operational, rather than strategic, approach to Cloud Computing this paradigm based on issues related to the safety and availability of cloud data. These results are aligned with other scientific literature on this subject. The theoretical contribution of this research lies in the use of SRT; this integrated use of implicative, lexical, and content analyses may be used to better examine constructs in the future.

Keywords

• Cloud Computing
• social representation theory
• word evoking technique
• Information Technology infrastructure management
• information security