Overcoming Cloud Concerns with Trusted Execution Environments? Exploring the Organizational Perception of a Novel Security Technology in Regulated Swiss Companies

Trusted execution environments are a new approach for isolating data, specific parts of code, or an entire application within untrusted cloud environments. This emerging security technology could also enable the migration to cloud infrastructures for organizations working with highly sensitive data. As current research does not address the organizational perception of trusted execution environments (TEEs), we conducted an explorative study to clarify the technological, environmental, and organizational views on this technology by health care, life sciences, and banking companies in Switzerland. The interview findings show that in these industries, missing technological knowledge as well as privacy and process regulation are perceived to be the most critical driver for organizational adoption of TEEs. The identified low intrinsic motivation to adopt novel technologies permits us to conclude that clarifying the regulatory impact of TEEs could drive future adoption by organizations.