Smart grid cyber-physical systems (SG-CPS) are intelligent platforms that incorporate IoT-enabled multifunctional layers including the physical, perception, communication, cyber, and application layers. It includes supervisory control and data acquisition, wide-area measurement systems, and advanced metering infrastructure for remote data aggregation, monitoring, and control operations. From an environmental perspective, these green technologies support two-way operations, which generate and transmit data over wired and wireless communication systems. However, this critical infrastructure faces data privacy and cybersecurity challenges. Hence, extensive research is required to address data privacy and security gaps to strengthen national grid cybersecurity and reduce economic losses. Therefore, this review highlights cryptographic techniques as significant mechanisms to ensure data confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Accordingly, we investigate IoT-enabled multifunctional layer components and applications, their cybersecurity objectives, requirements, and essential cryptographic standards, protocols, and cyber-attacks. Subsequently, we categorize cryptography techniques for analyzing contemporary lightweight, authenticated, and key agreement protocols. Moreover, we present a comparative analysis of the performance, efficiency, and security features in cryptographic solutions. Finally, we identify challenges related to smart grid, cybersecurity, and cryptographic techniques, along with outlined recommended future research directions. The significance of this study lies in providing valuable insights into the performance and security of cryptographic techniques. It supports researchers who may consider tested cryptographic solutions to advance data privacy and cybersecurity within SG’s multifunctional layers of infrastructure.

Many studies have focused on the adoption of social commerce (s-commerce) by customers but not by businesses or by microbusinesses. Further, they have investigated this adoption from a researcher's perspective while using quantitative approaches. To fill this gap, the study sheds light on the success of Instagram for microbusinesses (IMB) in an Arab country and highlights the need for more investigation in order to understand this complex phenomenon. In this study, the authors use a qualitative approach to 27 microbusiness cases that adopted Instagram for s-commerce. They use technological innovation theories to successfully identify and classify the drivers and inhibitors of success under different contexts. Hence, they find that the success of IMB in Kuwait is contingent on addressing different technological, organizational, and environmental challenges. Further, they find that Instagram initiatives are still evolving and still need assistance from different stakeholders to overcome several hurdles. This study provides different recommendations that advance the theory and practice.

Despite the plethora of studies investigating different impacting factors on intention to re-use (IR) e-government services, they suffer from two limitations. First, initial studies provide mixed results on the effect of risk perception (PR) on IR. Second, although e-commerce studies have considered PR as a complex construct that encompasses several dimensions to date, none have considered exploring the effect of this complex construct on IR e-government websites. Thus, this study attempts to extend surrogates to such gaps by integrating PR and user trust (UT) in IR e-government using mixed-methods. It involved both a qualitative study (n = 81) to identify perceive risk antecedents and quantitative study (369 users) to build and test the proposed model. Results show that of eight PR factors, only privacy, time, psychological, and overall emerged as negative influencers and as such indirectly affect the IR government, through the mediating role of perceived value and user’s trust. System quality also has an indirect effect on IR through perceived value mediation.

The influence of eWoM use for s-commerce in the context of Arab region remains unexplored. To bridge this gap, this study develops a model for eWoM use for s-commerce post adoption. This model link three antecedents-factors (trust towards other people, trust of internet/Instagram, and perceived risks) to eWoM use for s-commerce through the mediation of perceived enjoyment, perceived value, and customer satisfaction. The model is validated with a large sample of 843 Instagram users using LISREL tool. Research findings revealed that propensity to trust, trust of internet, perceived risk, and perceived value affect use of eWoM through the indirect effect of perceived enjoyment and satisfaction, while perceived value has no direct effect on eWoM. Customer satisfaction was a predominant predictor of eWoM use. The model has relevant contributions and implications for both research and practice.

Many studies have investigated technology adoption in western countries and ignored the Arab region. The available Arab studies focused on the technology adoption model (TAM) and its subsequent variations while leaving important factors such as information quality, user involvement, availability of training and top management support on the success of information systems (IS). Despite that these factors were studied scantly in some past studies, this research attempts to fill this gap and develop a more integrative model of IS success. Results indicated the existence of four critical success factors, three organizational factors (management support, training, user involvement), and an information system factor (information quality), that affect IS success (use and satisfaction). Results found that information quality for the first time mediates the effect of the three organizational factors on IS success, while TAM components (perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use) have no effect.

Extending workflow orchestration to embrace monitoring and adaptation within cloud environment is perceived to be a challenging activity. It has to consider different resources, require heavy processing to adapt to the dynamic nature of cloud environment. In this paper, we propose a multi-model framework for workflow resource monitoring, prediction, and adaptation. The framework supports continuous monitoring of several workflow runtime cloud entities and detect diverse types of violations (e.g. resource saturation). Moreover, collected logs resulted from monitoring are used as a training dataset for predicting resource shortage. Furthermore, two adaptation strategies are proposed to cope with environment resources changes and avoid violations: 1) monitoring-based adaptation and 2) prediction-based adaptation. Both adaptation schemes perform the necessary actions to adapt resources according to workflow required quality levels. To evaluate our monitoring and adaptation approaches we used a real cloud environment where we perform a couple of experimental scenarios. Experiments results showed that our framework and proposed monitoring, prediction and adaptation schemes are efficient in detecting violations, accurately predicting cloud resource shortages and accordingly issuing the proper adapting decisions.

This research investigates the impact of 10 factors, extended from the technological innovation literature, on the adoption of different eCommerce communications and applications technologies (EC) in small businesses (SMEs) in New Zealand (NZ). The research results showed that the CEO’s innovativeness was the only determinant of external-email adoption. CEO’s involvement was found to be the only determinant of Intranet adoption. Relative advantage and competition were found to influence Extranet/VPN adoption significantly and positively. However, support from technology vendors appeared to violate its hypothesised effect on Extranet/VPN adoption. Regression analysis found that pressure from suppliers was the only determinant of Internet-EDI adoption. The adoption of Web sites was influenced by the information intensity of products and the CEO’s innovativeness. The significant factors suggested the uniqueness of the adoption phenomenon in SMEs in NZ. However, the factors that appeared to be significant and the ones that appeared to be insignificant factors and the implications arising from these factors led to a conclusion which suggested the weakness of the EC adoption phenomenon in SMEs in NZ. The research discusses theoretical implications emerging from the research factors and portrays a path for future research. 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.