Ethics and Trust. A Literature Review on Cloud Computing Services

Seminar paper from the year 2017 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: 1,7, Linneaus University (School of Business and Economics), course: Contemporary Marketing, language: English, abstract: Even though security issues when using cloud computing services have been looked at from a technical perspective, research has failed to explain why consumers use cloud services extensively despite their distrust. Observations have been made that users are in a dilemma where they use a service they are not comfortable with. Besides trust, the ethical perspective of all stakeholders in cloud computing has not been discussed or connected to the issue of trust.

The unease consumers feel when signing up for a cloud service could be transformed from a dilemma into a competitive advantage. Therefore, it is of high interest to cloud service providers to understand how they can gain competitive advantage over competitors by building consumer relationships based on trust and ethical norms. The results of this literature review show that making use of insights into cloud computing issues and awareness for trustful, ethical relationships with the customer, service providers can create competitive advantage. Following ethical norms and building trust with customers enables companies to gain first-mover-advantages in the field of cloud computing services. They can successfully distance themselves from competitors by promoting marketing campaigns that emphasize their high ethical standards and treatment of users.

This paper adds the dimension of ethics to the dilemma of mistrust in cloud computing, exploring whether this is a key influence on consumer trust, since there was a research gap discovered in researching a trustful provide-user relationship as well as an ethical perspective in cloud computing.