Part I: The Inhibiting Role of Unrealistic Optimism in Providers’ IT Security Risk Management

Abstract

In this chapter, we present our empirical analysis of the role of the decision makers’ subjective ITSR perceptions in the Cloud providers’ IT security risk management. In particular, we demonstrate the inhibiting effects of unrealistic optimism (UO) in the ITSR perceptions of Cloud providers’ decision makers on the outcome of the providers’ IT security risk management. Therefore, we first show the theoretical background and the hypotheses development of this part (Section 3.1). In this section, we also show the development of the proposed theoretical model of Cloud providers’ IT security risk management. Afterwards, we show the research methodology of the empirical study (Section 3.2), including the proposed approaches to measure UO in the ITSR perceptions of providers’ decision makers. Then, we present the analyses of the collected data along with the results (Section 3.3). The findings of this part are summarized and discussed (Section 3.4).