All respondents were agreed that there are no specific legal frameworks in Ethiopia’s agricultural sector to adopt and implement cloud computing. Likewise, respondents were agreed that the differences in agricultural regulation in a different country will have an impact on the adoption of new technological innovations such as cloud computing. Similarly, an interview conducted with one of the sectors’ supervision manager at EMOA also prove that Ethiopia does not have a special rule on the use of cloud computing or it is not yet has included in the regulation.
Limitations of ICT Investment and Usage All Respondents agreed that high investment cost on IT infrastructures, inefficient use of IT resources, lack of collaboration among national meteorology, marketing, and others to share IT resources, internet bandwidth inconsistency, the changing computing needs which bear compatibility problems and other related factors were the key challenges in the current ICT usages of Ethiopian agriculture sector. Lack of up-to-date plan for ICT service delivery strategy also considered as a limitation for sectors` to fully harvest the opportunities presented by the latest technology. The result shows that in regard the existing cost incurred on ICT infrastructure to support the agriculture services, many respondents were not agreed about its efficiency. The suggestions from all respondents on cloud indicated that ‘compared with the existing IT system to support agricultural services, using cloud computing in agriculture sector is efficient to perform agriculture activities at lower costs.
Respondents agreed on the insufficiency of the current ICT infrastructure investment and usage suggested that sectors needed to improve the agricultural services by employing the state of the art technology being used anywhere in the world. They also suggested that continual improvement and advancement of technology would assist sectors` for harvesting the actual and expected benefits from ICT. Sufficiency of technology to achieve sectors mission and vision Do you think that the current ICT owned by your sectors are sufficient to achieve EMOA mission and vision? Number of “Yes” Number of “No” 0 10 The question asked to get the reaction of the respondent whether their ICT is sufficient or not.
As shown in table 5 above the entire respondent agreed on the insufficiency of their access ICT to meet their sector mission and vision in satisfying their customers. All the respondents say “NO”. Market Accessibility for Agriculture product Do you think that the market access for the agricultural product through the country is equal? Number of “Yes” Number of “No” 0 14 The question asked about the equality of market accessibility through the country for the agricultural goods and products has been asked all of them say “NO”. It was true there is no uniform market through the country which means that the accessibility of market is local rather than global (not equal) or big difference is there from market to market. Availability of integrated service delivery TABLE 5.4.
The question asked about the availability of integrated services that needed for Agriculture sector together with meteorology, marketing, and others has been asked all of them say “NO”. It was true there is no integrated system in the agricultural sector currently. 5.5. Selection of Cloud Services Provider Before dealing with the cloud service user organization should have to analyze the cloud providers’ characteristics like the location of their data center, the service they provide, Service Level Agreement (SLA) and billing method. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Windows Azur, SalesForce, and IBM are among the major cloud providers. In this research, Windows Azur selected as a candidate cloud provider because Windows Azure platform 48 provides friendly interfaces to deal with the heart of PaaS and SaaS in developing and deploying differently .NET applications start from very simple Hello World applications to distributed relational databases.
One of Windows Azure’s services is SQL Azure, which presents DB services from building the DB to deploy it and scale it through Microsoft data centers. SQL Azure includes relational database services, such as reporting, querying, and data synchronizing. Windows Azure offers several features including computing resources, storage, database, Virtual Machines (VMs), access control, Content Delivery Network (CDN), caching, virtual network, service bus, business intelligence, and marketplace. Windows Azure was built to help developers succeed in their application, especially for the developers who build remote data center applications by providing different tools. Windows Azure provides a platform service which includes operating systems, a set of developer tools, and different levels on network control to develop, host, scale, and manage developed applications on the web and non-web environments 49.
5.6. Selection of cloud computing service model Cloud providers basically use three cloud computing service delivery models such as IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. Among these service delivery models, SaaS has been chosen as a service delivery model in this research. The SaaS customer is an end-user of complete applications running on a cloud infrastructure and offered on a platform on-demand. The applications are typically accessible through a thin client interface, such as a web browser. The customer does not control either the underlying infrastructure or platform, other than application parameters for specific user settings. Even if we choose a certain model to deliver a service to the customer there are some synergies among the model. For example, if an infrastructure as a service provider needs some application form to their customer and also, we choose SaaS for the agriculture user they also use the platform and infrastructure of the provider.
