Does the Augmentation of Service Level Agreements Affect User Decisions in Cloud Adoption Scenarios? - an Experimental Approach

Despite the benefits of cloud computing, customers are reluctant to use cloud services as they have concerns about data security and privacy. Many of these concerns arise due to the lack of transparency. Consequently, bridging the existing information asymmetry and, thus, fostering trust in the cloud provider is of high relevance. As service level agreements are an important trust building factor and due to their technical and complex nature, the augmentation of these is promising. Therefore, we investigate the effects of augmenting service level agreements (by means of augmented browsing) on the ease of the information gathering process and simultaneously on perceived information overload, comprehension and transparency in a web-based experiment. The results of our online experiment do not confirm our assumed positive effects of augmentation. Nonetheless, we show that the ease of gathering information about a cloud service positively influences the perceived trustworthiness. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the perceived trustworthiness of a cloud computing provider largely determines the intention to use its services. Thus, besides improving security, cloud providers not only have to communicate trust-critical information but also have to identify suitable measures of information provisioning that considerably improve transparency while lowering information overload.