A compliant assurance model for assessing the trustworthiness of cloud-based e-commerce systems

Many cloud-based e-commerce stores aim to attract and retain customers in order to be competitive. However, they are all faced with a challenge regarding gaining and maintaining consumer trust in a volatile cloud-based e-commerce environment where risks pertaining to information security, privacy of information and inadequate monitoring of compliance to applicable laws are prevalent. The pervasiveness of these risks has indirectly propelled the development of web assurance models, which were designed in an attempt to encourage online consumer trust. Regrettably, many of these models have been inadequate in certain areas, such as being unable to provide online real-time assurance on a comprehensive set of attributes, which include a check of compliance to the applicable e-commerce legislation or standards in a cloud-based environment. The aim of this research was to examine whether the integration of the attributes of adaptive legislation, adaptive ISO standards, policies, advanced user security and website availability can be used to develop a compliant assurance model. The model uses an intelligent cooperative rating based on the analytical hierarchy process and page ranking techniques to improve the level of cloud-based trustworthiness. We illustrated in an empirical explanatory survey conducted with 15 test samples from IEEE, Science Direct databases and real life data captured from E-commerce sites that the proposed compliant model strongly contributes to the improvement of cloud-based sites, as well as enhancing the trustworthiness of these websites. The findings of this research study can be used as a reference guide to understand the effectiveness of cloud-based e-commerce assurance models, as well as to enhance the trustworthiness of these models.