Book

Cloud computing has transformed how individuals and organisations use technology. Hardware, platforms, software and storage now arrive as services (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS) from data centres around the world. Yet a sharp rise in data breaches has made one question decisive for anyone choosing a provider: can it be trusted?Researchers have proposed many models for measuring “cloud trust”, but most reflect the researchers’ own priorities rather than the views of the people who actually use the cloud. This book takes the consumer’s side.Drawing on a validated survey of 272 free and paid cloud users, most with years of hands-on experience and many working with AWS, Microsoft and Google, it examines five trust components and their sub-elements: Security, Governance, Service Level Agreements, Audit, and Diverse factors. Responses were analysed in SPSS, and a structured weighting procedure turns them into each component’s percentage contribution to trust.The findings are striking. Security accounts for 57% of perceived trust, with data security and physical infrastructure security rated most important. Governance follows at 21%, led by a clear exit policy. SLAs and audit each contribute about 10%, and factors such as technology stack and data-centre capacity barely register. The low scores for audit suggest many consumers do not yet see its link to security, an awareness gap providers can close.Clear, data-driven and practical, this book is for researchers and students of cloud computing, and for cloud providers who want to earn and keep their customers’ trust.