Effects of Security and Privacy Concerns on using of Cloud Services in Energy Industry, an Oil and Gas Company: A Case Study

The topic of ‘‘the cloud’’ has attracted significant attention throughout the past few years. It allows resource sharing that includes software, platform and infrastructure by means of virtualization. Cloud Adoption in Oil & Gas companies have approached cloud with caution, but they are increasingly deploying cloud services. Energy companies have carefully weighed whether they should opt for a public cloud versus a private one, and which applications are fit for deployment via the cloud. For the most part, the industry has opted to use cloud for generic purposes. Generic business functions like payroll process and procurement are being run through the cloud, along with customer relationship management, likely through software-as-a-service offerings that have become well-known. Security is as much of an issue in the cloud as it is anywhere else. Different people share different point of view on cloud computing. Some believe it is unsafe to use cloud. Cloud vendors go out of their way to ensure security. This paper aims to understand the effects of security and privacy concerns on educational use of cloud services. This proposed a research model based on Ajzen’s (1991) Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). Following the TPB, the research developed a model, which posits that staff attitudes predicted by security and privacy perceptions and behavioral intentions are predicted by attitudes towards using cloud services. The Model was assess the based on the data collected by means of survey questionnaires. Results supported the proposed model, validating the predictive power of the TPB.