Trust Establishment and Estimation in Cloud Services: A Systematic Literature Review

Cloud computing has increasingly attracted a large number of entrepreneurs to deploy innovative web services to expand the horizon of their businesses. The selection of trustworthy services, by considering the adequate QoS parameters, is imperative for the cloud service consumers to fulfill their requirements. Over the years, many studies have been carried out to establish trust between service providers and cloud service consumers. The findings of these studies need to be analyzed in order to explore the essential features and limitations with respect to the essential QoS requirements. Therefore, a systematic literature review has been performed in this study with an aim to identify and classify the existing research on trust establishment and estimation in cloud services. A critical review of the existing literature has been presented along with the identification of potential future research avenues. This study has also highlighted the need of improving the service selection process by employing user preferences based on their particular application domains in the context of utility.