Cloud-based solutions used by hungarian SMEs and analysis of its effects

Abstract

The wide range of technological innovations took place in the post-millennium period and later became widely available have fundamentally reshaped the relationship between ICT infrastructure and business in the life of for-profit organizations. This is particularly true for the so-called primary (value-creating) processes. These technologies that have fundamentally transformed the way business organizations operate are collectively referred to as "Industry 4.0" technologies. A significant group of these technologies are the cloud-based solutions. By using these solutions, the users can get benefits from the ICT infrastructure through a third-party service. These services can be applications made available on a specific online interface (SaaS), or various platform elements (PaaS, for example: application servers, virtual servers, etc.) or infrastructure elements such as leased computing capacity (IaaS). By using cloud-based solutions, the customer can avoid the investment needed to run the ICT infrastructure and the additional problems rooted by the operation of ICT-infrastructure. A questionnaire survey was carried out in early 2019, in which 498 respondents voluntarily participated. The survey investigated the deployment level of ICT infrastructure among SMEs in Hungary, its information security consequences and how the management of the for-profit organizations evaluate the contribution of ICT infrastructure to the success of their business. The use of different cloud-based solutions was also measured in the mentioned questionnaire. The paper presents the research results of the prevalence of use of different cloud solutions with similar studies in the region. Furthermore, it examines whether cloud solutions have individually detectable beneficial effects on business operations, and whether synergies can be identified when multiple cloud applications are used together. Based on the qualitative results of the research and their interpretation, a broader analysis has been offered.