The Role of Trust in Cloud Service Providers on the Adoption of Cloud Computing in Saudi Arabia: An Empirical Investigation

Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most significant developments in the field of Information Technology (IT) in recent years, allowing others to leverage third-party services. Therefore, it is essential to identify and address trust in cloud service providers as one of the key predictors of the acceptance of cloud computing. Several prior studies covered the technological facets of cloud-based contexts, including cloud virtualization, scalability, and security. However, it is argued that the biggest barrier to cloud computing is not technical but rather cognitive or behavioral and in particular attitudinal. Thus, this research aims to study individuals' attitudes and perceptions toward cloud computing, with a particular concentration on the perception of trust and its constructs in the cloud computing environment, namely Service Level Agreements (SLA) verification and reputation, in order to investigate the factors influencing the adoption of cloud computing in Saudi Arabia. This study presents an extended Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to include trust as a cognition, representing a person's perception of social influence to perform or not perform a behavior under consideration. The study model also identifies factors affecting cloud computing adoption by considering reputation-based trust and SLA verification-based trust variables, which have been rarely examined before. The proposed model was able to explain 64% of the variance in behavioral intention and 78% of individuals' attitudes toward the adoption of cloud computing in Saudi Arabia. The study's findings show that the proposed model explained a significant amount of variation in cloud computing adoption. It suggests that the model expansion by incorporating trust in cloud computing service providers, reputation-based trust, and SLA verification-based trust factors were valuable explorations. Further, the results also show that "reputation-based trust" alone explains 29.46% of individuals’ attitudes and 23.45% of their "behavioral intentions" toward using cloud computing. This effect on people's attitudes and intentions towards adopting cloud computing was indirect and through the trust construct.