Multi-Tenancy Issues with Service Delivery in Developing Economies: Privacy, Trust and Availability Concerns

TL;DR

This paper examines multi-tenancy issues in cloud computing within developing economies, focusing on privacy, trust, and availability concerns through empirical data from Ghana, highlighting security and SLA importance for SME adoption.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into privacy, trust, and availability challenges faced by cloud users and providers in a developing economy, emphasizing the need for improved cybersecurity and SLAs.

Findings

Security and SLAs are critical for privacy and trust.

Perennial power outages significantly impact availability.

Cybersecurity concerns hinder cloud adoption among SMEs.

Abstract

Cloud computing is a new paradigm and innovation in the technology service delivery. It is utilized for IT-enabled value creation. The capex-free nature of cloud service delivery renders it very attractive to many SMEs. But it is saddled with multi-tenancy issues; prominent under this study are concerns of privacy, trust and availability. How do end-users trust providers with their sensitive data? How secured and confidential are their corporate assets? Amidst the perennial power outages (a.k.a. Dumsor), what is the acceptable available uptime? We sampled and interviewed cloud service providers (CSPs) as well as end-users in Ghana, a developing economy. We also gleaned through some secondary data to ascertain some operational concerns. The results indicate that security and service level agreements (SLAs) are key concerns in respect of privacy and trust issues. Similarly, perennial power outages and security were key availability concerns. This was expected as end-users use cloud services for mission critical information assets, and so requires high availability. The implications are that the cyber-security concerns ought to be addressed if SMEs in developing economies are to adopt and accept cloud computing resources for IT-enabled competitive advantage.