Cloud-based services users and trust issues : a comparative study of gender and national culture perspectives

Cloud-based services are becoming increasingly popular for different purposes such as data storage, application deployment, testing and development, data backup and other such purposes which may include very sensitive and confidential data. Several articles related to cloud services have been published. However, none of them have studied cloud-based services usage and trust issues in cloud-based services from gender and national-culture perspectives. Since sensitive data are stored in the cloud services, there is risk of data theft and other such attacks. There were some serious incidents about information leakage and data theft in cloud services in recent years. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how trustworthy these services are and if not, what are the trust issues and what measures can be applied while using cloud services to secure the data in cloud. The purpose of this thesis is to identify the trust issues in cloud services and to present the data about cloud usage, reasons for not using cloud services and security considerations while using cloud services by future information technology (IT) professionals in five countries, namely, China, Finland, Greece, Nepal and UK from gender and national culture perspective. It discusses the cloud trust issues and solutions to overcome those issues. These findings would be useful for the higher-level institutions to redesign the curriculum in a way that students would be aware of cloud services, their advantages and challenges and security measures. It also presents the reasons for not using cloud services which could be useful for the cloud service providers to consider while providing services to consumers. The future IT professionals and other cloud service users should have more Cryptography-based knowledge, which should be taught through Curricula, and that knowledge could result in cloud services and online consumers using encryption technology more, which, on the other hand, will facilitate the relationship of trust between cloud-based services and service consumers