Building consumer trust in the cloud: an experimental analysis of the cloud trust label approach

Journal of Cloud Computing

Advances, Systems and Applications

Table 1 Summary of Trust Mechanisms Impacting Cloud Computing

Trust Mechanisms	Example	References
Website design	The design, colours and aesthetics impact the perceptions of trustworthiness of online vendors.	[42, 44, 45]
Feedback Reputation systems	Comprehensive score reflecting an overall opinion or an aggregate of scores on several major aspects of performance.	[19, 22, 23, 26, 52, 84]
Third Party Assurances	Third party attestation, certification and/or assurances seals e.g. ISO/IEC 27001.	[19, 22, 85]
Cloud transparency mechanism	• Publicly accessible self-assessment of security controls e.g. Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) Security, Trust & Assurance Registry (STAR).	[19, 22, 59]
Cloud transparency mechanism	• On-demand access to information on “elements of transparency” e.g. CSA CloudTrust Protocol.	[19, 58, 59]
SLA-verification based trust	Quality of service monitoring based on pre-defined SLA service levels.	[19, 22, 23, 57]
Trust as a Service	Single point service for configuring and managing security of cloud services from multiple service providers.	[19, 60]
“Formal” trust mechanisms	Trust based on “formal” certification and chains of trust for validation of attributes of a cloud service or its provider.	[19, 61]
Trust Label	Standardised label that presents a visual, real time summary of a range of relevant security and service information about a particular cloud to consumers in an easily understandable format.	[16, 58, 73, 86]