Managing Cloud Computing Environment: Gaining Customer Trust with Security and Ethical Management

This paper aims to find out the management best practices of new hype of technology like Cloud computing. The management of such environment is highly dependent on the trust relationship between the cloud service providers and their customers (and/or other businesses). This trust is not only dependent on the latest technological tools, but rather also dependent on the management strategy in such highly critical environment. To achieve this objective, a survey was conducted related to the acceptability of the cloud services which has resulted in three main sections. These were: security, data protection and ethics in cloud computing environment. The sample size was 441 where it was resulted in highly significant relationship between ethics and security as well as ethics and data protection which are the main two motivations for any business to join the cloud. Based on this study, a guideline of managing cloud computing to maintain these three issues was described. Ten steps were proposed to protect cloud services from possible unethical behaviors as well as to protect systems from possible security breach. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.