Conceptual model for factors affecting trusts of software as a service usage in public network

Abstract

Software as a service (SaaS) is a cloud computing model that are extensively adopted and being used every day in the growing technology era. SaaS has provided variety of functionalities and flexibilities to save time, cost and efforts on how people do and run their day to day work and tasks. Although SaaS provides opportunities and convenience, there are also a lot of security issues that still exists. There are voices of public users on online articles emphasizing about how dangerous it is for connecting to a public network. Given the nature that a public network is an open connection, hackers is able to sniff the packets and penetrate into public network with penetration tools such as Wireshark, Ettercap, Burp Suite and Network Miner. Man in the middle (MITM) attack tweak the data transit on network interface card to examine the network traffic protocols such as FTP, HTTP, TCP and UDP. The scarcity of security measures particularly for public networks is at its utmost concern on usage of SaaS in a public network. Therefore, in addressing to this problem, research is conducted to identify the significant factors namely performance risks, financial risks, privacy risks, overall risks, personal disposition, familiarity, perceived security, perceived privacy and strategic thinking. The results shown that perceived privacy and overall risks are the most positively correlated with 45% correlation out of nine examined factors. This study may assist the public network providers in designing network security policies with regards to the presence of SaaS usage in public network.