Abstract-Digital Business Ecosystem (DBE) is a decentralised environment where very small enterprises (VSEs) and small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) interoperate by establishing collaborations with each other. Collaborations play a major role in the development of DBEs where it is often difficult to select partners, as they are most likely strangers. Even though trust forms the basis for collaboration decisions, trust and reputation information may not be available for each participant. Recommendations from other participants are therefore necessary to help with the selection process. Given the nature of DBEs, social network centrality measures that can influence power and control in the network need to be considered for DBE trust and reputation. A number of social network centralities, which influence reputation in social graphs have been studied in the past. This paper investigates an unexploited centrality measure, betweenness centrality, as a metric to be considered for trust and reputation.

This research proposes a trust and reputation model to support collectivist digital business ecosystems for regions such as Africa, where collectivist culture norms and behaviours are common. As trusting behaviour is strongly influenced by cultural norms and beliefs, trust should not only be considered from a technical perspective, but also from a cultural perspective. A multi-level group trust and reputation model is proposed to support group harmony using social network metrics. The implementation of the model ensures that collectivist communities are more comfortable when transacting with each other, thereby improving economic performance. The performance of Trustcv is measured through multi-agent simulations, giving interesting results when compared to simulations of existing trust models. The results indicate that Trustcv can successfully be used to support trust in collectivist digital business ecosystems.

The increasing demand for online and real-time interaction with IT infrastructures by end users is facilitated by the proliferation of user-centric devices such as laptops, iPods, iPads, and smartphones. This trend is furthermore propounded by the plethora of apps downloadable to end user devices mostly within mobile-cum-cloud environments. It is clear that there are many evidences of innovation with regard to end user devices and apps. Unfortunately, little, if any, information security innovation took place over the past number of years with regard to the consumption of security services by end users. This creates the need for innovative security solutions that are human-centric and flexible. This chapter presents a framework for consuming loosely coupled (but interoperable) cloud-based security services by a variety of end users in an efficient and flexible manner using their mobile devices.

The increasing demand for online and real-time interaction with IT infrastructures by end users is facilitated by the proliferation of user-centric devices such as laptops, iPods, iPads, and smartphones. This trend is furthermore propounded by the plethora of apps downloadable to end user devices mostly within mobile-cum-cloud environments. It is clear that there are many evidences of innovation with regard to end user devices and apps. Unfortunately, little, if any, information security innovation took place over the past number of years with regard to the consumption of security services by end users. This creates the need for innovative security solutions that are human-centric and flexible. This chapter presents a framework for consuming loosely coupled (but interoperable) cloud-based security services by a variety of end users in an efficient and flexible manner using their mobile devices.