Dark Clouds on the Horizon? Effects of Cloud Storage on Security Breaches

Abstract

This research examines how a firm's cloud storage implementation affects different types of security breaches in both the short- and long-term. Building on the attention-based view, we find that cloud storage implementation positively relates to a firm's external breaches and accidental internal breaches in the short-term. However, the positive relationship between cloud storage implementation and external breaches diminishes over time and becomes insignificant long-term. Our results demonstrate a long-term security advantage of cloud storage in reducing accidental internal breaches. We did not find a significant association between cloud storage and malicious internal breaches. Findings highlight the need for firms to direct limited resources to different security risks in the short- and long-term of cloud storage implementation over time. This research contributes to our understanding of cloud storage's security implications and explicitly theorizes the role of attention in firm IT security management. We contribute to the attention-based view by contextualizing the theory to IT security. We highlight temporal dynamics through distinct attentional mechanisms, including selective attention, attentional flexibility, and attentional vigilance.