Chicken and Egg Problem: What Drives Cloud Service Providers and Certification Authorities to Adopt Continuous Service Certification?

Recent research efforts resulted in innovative prototypes that enable certification authorities to continuously certify cloud service providers (CSP). Performing continuous service certification (CSC) is beneficial for CSP and certification authorities, and has the potential to reduce security and privacy concerns of customers that hamper the adoption of cloud services. Yet, CSC is currently lacking wide scale diffusion due to the ‘chicken and egg problem’: certification authorities demand a critical mass of consumers before they consider entering the market. Yet, CSC services are desperately needed to establish this critical mass of consumers in the first place. Hence, to enable diffusion of CSC, certification authorities (as CSC provider) and CSP (as CSC consumer) have to be motivated both to adopt the CSC innovation. We build on the technology-push and market-pull theories to identify factors that drive CSC diffusion. We take a holistic perspective in particular as we analyze the adoption intention of CSP and certification authorities simultaneously from a technology-push and market-pull perspective to resolve the ‘chicken and egg problem’.