Cloud Provider Transparency: An Empirical Evaluation

Cloud computing is quickly becoming the next wave of technological evolution as a new approach to providing IT capabilities needed by business. Driving interest and investment in cloud computing is the revolutionary change to the economic model. Cloud computing also promises to allow IT to respond more quickly to the needs of the business. Key tenets of cloud computing include being on-demand and self-service. This shift to the way that a business engages IT services creates new challenges including regulating how internal business units purchase cloud services. How does a business assess cloud providers services for security, privacy, and service levels? The purpose of this study is to develop an instrument for evaluating a cloud provider's transparency of security, privacy, and service level competencies via its self-service web portals and web publications, and then to empirically evaluate cloud service providers to measure how transparent by using the instrument.