An Australian survey links vendor and legal uncertainty to perceived cloud security risk, which in turn lowers adoption intention.
A study published in the Journal of the Association for Information Systems reports that perceived vendor opportunism and perceived legislative uncertainty were significantly associated with perceived cloud computing security risk. The paper also found a significant negative relationship between that perceived risk and intention to adopt cloud services.
The authors built a model grounded in transaction cost theory and tested it using survey data collected in Australia.
The abstract does not list specific limitations. It does state that the data come from an Australian survey, which narrows the geographic scope of the reported findings.
For practitioners and students, the result suggests that concerns about vendor behaviour and unclear regulation can shape how risky cloud services appear, and that this perception matters for adoption decisions. The paper also reports adoption rates by application and service type, which may be useful for benchmarking current practice.
