Ayten Öksüz

Cloud Storage Services in Higher Education – Results of a Preliminary Study in the Context of the Sync&Share-Project in Germany

In recent years, a growing number of institutions in higher education is in progress to adopt cloud storage services. This paper describes the Sync&Share NRW-project in North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany) with a target audience of up to 500,000 users and presents the main results of a preliminary large-scale survey at the University of Muenster with more than 3,000 participants. The results of the analysis indicates a very high demand for an on-premise cloud service solution in German higher education with mobile access, a storage volume comparable to commercial offerings, collaborative features such as simultaneous work on text documents and, above all, high data protection standards.

Sync&Share North Rhine-Westphalia: a case on a university-based cloud computing service provider

Raimund Vogl is the project leader of a large-scale project that aims to introduce a university-based cloud storage service to major German universities. He needs to convince other universities to join the project. The case is based on a real situation and shows real challenges. The university-based scenario helps students to better put themselves in the context of the case. Furthermore, the case serves to teach the basic principles, risks, and benefits of cloud computing. The main challenge faced by the protagonist is to come up with a plan for organizational and user adoption. Accordingly, several technology-related theories can be used. In addition to user adoption theories such as the technology acceptance model, this case demonstrates the need of Sync&Share NRW to be perceived as a trustworthy provider. The case helps to understand the concept of trust, the relationship between trust and cloud computing acceptance, and ways to gain trust in the context of cloud computing.

Trust in the Information Systems Discipline

The digitalization of today’s world has greatly advanced during the last few years and affects nearly all areas of life. The research discipline Information Systems (IS) views digitalization from multiple perspectives. On the one hand, IS is concerned with the development and functionality of technological artifacts. On the other hand, researchers in this field also investigate questions of how users perceive and actually use technological innovations. This last point brings about the question of how users deal with perceptions of risks that are inevitably connected to the use of technology (e.g., data theft, abuse of personal data). Thereby, trust research found its way into IS research since trust is widely considered to be a key factor in dealing with risk perceptions. Trust relations are commonly described as the relation between two parties: the trustor (who trusts) and the trustee (who is trusted). So far, technology has mainly been viewed as a medium through which trust can be transmitted or developed. With the emergence of quasi humans (e.g., recommendation agents), this ascription becomes more and more difficult and raises the question of whether or not a technology can be trusted. This article gives an overview of perspectives on the relations between users’ perceptions of risk, trust through and in technologies, and trust towards technology providers. We furthermore provide insights into the state of the art of trust research in the IS discipline.