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Building Customer Trust in Cloud Computing with an ICT-Enabled Global Regulatory Body

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Abstract

Building customer trust is a huge problem in the cloud computing paradigm. Today, hundreds of companies around the world are offering cloud services in major or minor scale with global or local reach. In spite of the availability of numerous establishments for cloud services, there is a critical link missing with the customers—and that is the lack of appropriate customer trust in the cloud provider’s services. The issue of trust in clouds has already been addressed from multiple technical perspectives where the researchers suggested solutions based on existing knowledge in other computing and communications systems. In this paper, we suggest a different concept of ensuring trust in cloud services by using the power of Information and Communications Technology. The basic idea lies in the fact that there should be a global standardization authority which would certify trusted cloud providers which in turn would earn customer trust. Novelty in this concept is mainly in its operational details presented in the paper. The main objective is to analyze various aspects of this proposed model from the policy making issues alongside slightly addressing technical issues. To make our work easily accessible to general readers and the experts, we also present the backgrounds of cloud computing and analyze the conceptual model with real-life challenges and issues.

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Notes

  1. The terms “user” and “customer” are used interchangeably throughout this paper.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewer(s) for the insightful comments which have helped improve the paper greatly. This work was fully supported by NDC Lab (Networking and Distributed Computing Laboratory), KICT, IIUM. Al-Sakib Khan Pathan is the corresponding author.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest of this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, International Islamic University Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

    Al-Sakib Khan Pathan

  2. College of Computer and Information Sciences, Al-Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

    Mohssen M. Z. E. Mohammed

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  1. Al-Sakib Khan Pathan
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Correspondence to Al-Sakib Khan Pathan.

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Pathan, AS.K., Mohammed, M.M.Z.E. Building Customer Trust in Cloud Computing with an ICT-Enabled Global Regulatory Body. Wireless Pers Commun 85, 77–99 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-015-2729-z

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