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Based on the case study of an SME company in the United Kingdom (which we will call SweetStar Cloud), this paper examines the attempts of the company to achieve significant strategic change. The company is attempting to move from being a tradition managed service provider of information services towards becoming a significant influencer in the market for digital services in the UK. As part of a knowledge transfer partnership (KTP), a local UK University has been closely involved in developing this new strategic direction and it is well poised to present and analyse the story. From the use of tried and tested strategic tools, including Porter's generic strategies and segmentation and targeting, the company has also embraced digital-specific approaches for developing partnerships with clients, developing pilot projects and experimenting with its use of social media. At the heart of this research is an analysis of the move from push marketing towards models of attraction. This paper aims to explore how traditional strategic tools are still applicable in the digital era alongside new tactical approaches in the digital sector. This aim has led to an approach to business that is responsible, in terms of moving away from a traditional push-selling model to one of partnership with customers at a strategic level. Strategy in dynamic markets often highlights responsiveness as a key success factor. The ability to respond (a response-ability) requires more agile companies. As SweetStar Cloud has developed its strategy, it has focused in achieving this more effective ability to respond through a more collaborative approach. In this sense, agile response-ability converges with business responsibility, as new abilities in communication, cooperation and trust development become key.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the adoption of cloud computing as a digital technology by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and assess its impact on sustainability of such enterprises.

A model was developed that featured factors influencing SMEs sustainability. Primary quantitative data was gathered using a survey as an instrument. Total set of n = 387 responses were gathered using a convenience sampling method.

Findings reveal that cost reduction, ease of use, reliability and sharing and collaboration factors have significant statistical impacts on SMEs sustainability, whereas privacy and security factor has no significant statistical on SMEs sustainability.

The study poses significant implications on managers and SME development authority to create an inductive environment for technological support for SMEs’ sustainability.

The study enhances SMEs’ performance and sustainability by upgrading their existing information and communications technology as a digital infrastructure and benefiting from novel IT-based cloud revolution. Several studies have provided an understanding of the use of cloud computing services in SMEs but lack enough information about the challenges and impact on SMEs sustainability.

Cloud computing gives several on-demand infrastructural services by dynamically pooling heterogeneous resources to cater to users’ applications. The task scheduling needs to be done optimally to achieve proficient results in a cloud computing environment. While satisfying the user’s requirements in a cloud environment, scheduling has been proven an NP-hard problem. Therefore, it leaves scope to develop new allocation models for the problem. The aim of the study is to develop load balancing method to maximize the resource utilization in cloud environment.

In this paper, the parallelized task allocation with load balancing (PTAL) hybrid heuristic is proposed for jobs coming from various users. These jobs are allocated on the resources one by one in a parallelized manner as they arrive in the cloud system. The novel algorithm works in three phases: parallelization, task allocation and task reallocation. The proposed model is designed for efficient task allocation, reallocation of resources and adequate load balancing to achieve better quality of service (QoS) results.

The acquired empirical results show that PTAL performs better than other scheduling strategies under various cases for different QoS parameters under study.

The outcome has been examined for the real data set to evaluate it with different state-of-the-art heuristics having comparable objective parameters.

A decade ago, the AIDS pandemic was driven by determinants such as poverty, deprivation, migrancy, patriarchy and gender-based violence. Today, however, the socio-economic and structural drivers of HIV infections have assumed or added other dimensions, including social and electronic media and reality television. These new dimensions saw further expression with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic from 2020 onwards. To consign both HIV and the COVID-19 pandemics to history’s museum of pandemics, strategists must employ greater infiltration and mastery of social and electronic media and reality TV. In the case of HIV, these created social clouds or bubbles where unprotected sex, transactional sex and multiple concurrent sexual partnerships are manufactured and proliferated globally. The same was the case with the COVID-19 pandemic, in which case these social clouds or bubbles created an alternative narrative about the source of the pandemic, who and how people get infected, and both the requisite remedies and preventions in this regard. With reality television gaining popularity on low-cost paid channels and free-to-air television; with smartphone penetration widening and costs of access to data falling, a social cloud has been created, enabling the cultural majority (those who control the media and capital) to set trends for everyone, including those with less means. These trends in turn become a standard many aspire to live by. The ontological density of the poor and lower middle-class women is lost through the universalisation of social and cultural trends set by middle elites who control the production and reproduction of knowledge and shape international and national imagination. It is these discourses, and their shaping of imagination as a consequence, that this chapter deals with. It looks at both the implications and consequences which, in the case of pandemics such as these, can be dire.

As the size of the population is growing and the capacity of the planet Earth is limited, human beings are searching for sustainable and technology-enabled solutions to support society, ecology and economy. One of the solutions has been developing smart sustainable cities. Smart sustainable cities are cities as systems, where their infrastructure, different subsystems and different functional domains are virtually connected to the information and communication technologies (ICT) and internet via sensors and devices and the Internet of Things (IoT), to collect and process real-time Big Data and make efficient, effective and sustainable solutions for a democratic and liveable city for its various stakeholders. This chapter explores the concepts and practices of sustainable smart cities across the globe and explores the use of technologies such as IoT, Blockchain technology and Cloud computing, etc. their challenges and then presents a view on business models for sustainable smart cities.

The global market for cloud gaming is growing rapidly. How gamers evaluate the service quality of this emerging form of cloud service has become a critical issue for both researchers and practitioners. Building on the literature on service quality and software as a service, this study develops and validates a gamer-centric measurement instrument for cloud gaming service quality.

A three-step measurement instrument development process, including item generation, scale development and instrument testing, was adopted to conceptualize and operationalize cloud gaming service quality.

Cloud gaming service quality consists of two second-order constructs of support service quality and technical service quality with seven first-order dimensions, namely rapport, responsiveness, reliability, compatibility, ubiquity, smoothness and comprehensiveness. The instrument exhibits desirable psychometric properties.

Practitioners can use this new measurement instrument to evaluate gamers' perceptions toward their service and to identify areas for improvement.

This study contributes to the service quality literature by utilizing qualitative and quantitative approaches to develop and validate a new measurement instrument of service quality in the context of cloud gaming and by identifying new dimensions (compatibility, ubiquity, smoothness and comprehensiveness) specific to it.

The current era of the fourth industrial revolution has attracted significant research on the use of digital technologies in improving construction project delivery. However, less emphasis has been placed on how these digital tools will influence the management of the construction workforce. To this end, using a review of existing works, this chapter explores the fourth industrial revolution and its associated technologies that can positively impact the management of the construction workforce when implemented. Also, the possible challenges that might truncate the successful deployment of digital technologies for effective workforce management were explored. The chapter submitted that implementing workforce management-specific digital platforms and other digital technologies designed for project delivery can aid effective workforce management within construction organisations. Technologies such as cloud computing, the Internet of Things, big data analytics, robotics and automation, and artificial intelligence, among others, offer significant benefits to the effective workforce management of construction organisations. However, several challenges, such as resistance to change due to fear of job loss, cost of investment in digital tools, organisational structure and culture, must be carefully considered as they might affect the successful use of digital tools and by extension, impact the success of workforce management in the organisations.

Many organizations struggle to utilize security-as-a-service (SecaaS) advantages effectively, thus challenging the assumption that adopting the SecaaS model will necessarily lead to post-adoption satisfaction. This research paper draws on the organizational mindfulness theory and investigates the factors that lead to satisfaction with SecaaS.

The key informant-based survey approach was employed to collect data from 215 organizations that were using the SecaaS model. PLS was used for data analysis.

Organizations with greater extents of internal security resources report higher satisfaction levels with SecaaS, thanks to the mediating effect of organizational mindfulness, and that organizations with extensive and mature security auditing were especially well-positioned to experience satisfaction with SecaaS.

This research provides new theoretical insights into the conditions under which organizations' post-adoption satisfaction with the SecaaS model is shaped by investigating the role of internal security resources and organizational mindfulness.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the value of cloud computing adoption (CCA) as a proxy for information technology (IT) flexibility (ITF) and IT effectiveness (ITE) among Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Jordan.

A research framework with five hypotheses has been developed based on the results of previous studies. Partial least squares-structural equation modeling has been used for data analysis.

The results revealed that elements of ITF in two domains, IT technical resource (connectivity, modularityand compatibility) and IT human resource (IT personnel skills) specific to CCA, were significantly correlated with ITE.

The findings have crucial implications: they contribute to the research community, administrators and cloud computing providers (CSPs) concerning the framework-improved procedure for CCA. The proposed model can enhance the awareness of service providers about why some SMEs accept cloud computing services, whereas actually the same ones having the same type of business do not. In addition, the above providers should enhance their interaction with the SMEs that contributed to the cloud computing knowledge to make a well-organized setting for the CCA, specifically, SMEs need that adopt an on-premise private cloud architecture. Moreover, necessary to determine the challenges in deploying solutions from the perspective of CSPs. The sample has been limited to Jordan respondents.

The research studies about the usage of cloud computing have shown its effects on SMEs today. Also, the different impacts of cloud computing on other sectors are at the center of attention. SMEs could get significant advantages by carefully considering and managing CCA from the ITF and ITE perspective.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to develop a framework for CCA based on the standpoint of ITF in two domains, IT technical resources (connectivity, modularity and compatibility) and IT human resources (IT personnel skills) and effectiveness.

This study aimed to analyze existing problems in the dissemination and management of emergency information on social media platforms, improve social media users' experience regarding such information, increase the efficiency of emergency information dissemination and curb the spread of misinformation.

In this study, the emergency information quality on social media platforms was examined. Based on the evaluation principles of the quality of mature information, social media information characteristics and the rules of emergency information dissemination, combined with relevant academic research results, an index to evaluate the quality of emergency information on social media was constructed. In addition, the authors have introduced cloud theory as an information quality evaluation method and used social media users' emotional characteristics to assess information quality evaluation results. A comprehensive system for evaluating emergency information quality, including indexes, methods and detection strategies was established. Based on a comprehensive system, a case study was conducted on the forest fires in Sichuan Province and the African swine fever events as reported on the Zhihu platform. In accordance with the results of the case study, the authors expanded the research and introduced the emotional characteristics of social media users as an independent evaluation dimension to evaluate the quality of emergency information on social media.

The comprehensive system's effectiveness was verified through the case study. Further, it was found that users' emotional characteristics (reflected in their information behavior) are inconsistent with their evaluation of websites' information quality regarding major emergencies. Integrating users' emotional characteristics into the information evaluation system can enhance its effectiveness following major emergencies.

First, an evaluation index system of emergency information quality on social media about major emergencies was offered. Unlike the commonly available index system for information quality evaluation, this proposed evaluation index system not only accounted for the characteristics of social media, such as massive disordered information, multiple information sources and rapid dissemination, but also for the characteristics of emergency events, such as variability and the absence of precursors. This proposed evaluation index system enhances the pertinence of the information quality evaluation and compensates for the shortcoming that the current research only focuses on evaluating social media information quality in a broad context, but pays insufficient attention to major emergencies. Second, cloud theory was introduced as a method to evaluate the emergency information quality found on social media. Existing research has primarily included the use of traditional statistical methods, which cannot transform numerical values into qualitative concepts effectively. Various indeterminate factors inevitably affect the quality of emergency information on social media platforms, and the traditional methods cannot eliminate this uncertainty in the evaluation process. The method to assess emergency information quality based on cloud theory can effectively compensate for the gaps in the research and improve the accuracy of information quality assessment. Third, the inspection and the dynamic adjustment of assessment results are absent in the research on information quality assessment, and the research has relied principally on the information users' evaluation and has paid insufficient attention to their attitudes and behaviors toward information. Therefore, the authors incorporated users' emotional characteristics into the evaluation of emergency information quality on social media and used them to test the evaluation results so that the results of the information quality assessment not only include the users' explicit attitudes but also their implicit attitudes. This enhances the effectiveness of the information quality assessment system. Finally, through this case study, it was found that an inconsistency exists between user evaluation and user emotional characteristics after major emergencies. The reasons for this phenomenon were explained, and the necessity of integrating user emotional characteristics into information quality assessment was demonstrated. Based on this, the users' emotional characteristics were used as a separate evaluation dimension for assessing the quality of emergency information on social media. Compared with assessing the quality of general information, integrating the user's emotional characteristics into the evaluation index system can lead the evaluation results to include not only the users' cognitive evaluation but also their emotional experience, further enhancing their adaptability.