Abstract
The technology-related trust issues hypothesized in the proposed model include security, authentication, confidentiality, non-repudiation, web interface, system performance and technology-related policies and procedures. These issues can be addressed by maintaining high levels of assurance with respect to various technologies discussed in the previous chapter. As is evident from the earlier discussions, most of these technologies are inter-related and have the potential to address more than one such issue. Based on the levels of assurance in respect of the relevant technologies, an attempt has been made to assess the level of assurance with regard to each of these technology related trust issues. This chapter presents an analysis of the assessment of these levels of assurance.
TopSecurity
Security is one of the most important technology-related trust issues. A number of technologies are available for ensuring better security for B2B e-commerce infrastructure. Some of the most commonly used technologies, as identified by the study, include anti-virus solutions, firewall technology, IDS/IPS, VPN implementation, VLan configuration, SSL and IPSec implementation and PKI technology. An attempt has been made to arrive at an overall level of assurance with regard to security being maintained by each of the sample company. For this purpose, levels of assurance were converted into ratings i.e. high level of assurance into 3, medium to 2 and low level of assurance to 1. These ratings of different technology tools deployed by the sample company were added to arrive at the overall ratings of the sample company. Based on these overall ratings, the sample companies were classified into three broad categories. Those having overall rating of 20 and above were classified in the ‘high level of assurance’ category; those having overall rating between 10 and 20 were classified in the ‘medium level of assurance’ category and those having overall rating less than 10 were classified in ‘low level of assurance’ category. The cutoff for this classification was based on careful observation and assessment of the data. Table 1 presents the number of sample companies with their respective levels of assurance in respect of the security issue.
Table 1. Security: Level of assurance
| High | Medium | Low | Total |
| No of Companies | 35 | 55 | 16 | 106 |
| Percentage | 32% | 53% | 15% | 100% |
As may be observed from Table 1, only one-third of the respondents were maintaining high level of assurance with regard to deployment of security related technologies. 15% of the respondents maintained low level of assurance in this regard. This would imply that these B2B e-commerce players were maintaining a ‘perceived’ security rather than ‘real’ security. This is likely to impact the credibility of the company and affect trust among trading partners. It is desirable that companies should enhance their level of assurance with respect to security so that the vulnerability of the B2B e-commerce infrastructure could be reduced.