In line with cloud computing emergence as the dominant enterprise computing paradigm, our conceptualization of the cloud computing reference architecture and service construction has also evolved. For example, to address the need for cost reduction and rapid provisioning, virtualization has moved beyond hardware to containers. More recently, serverless computing or Function-as-a-Service has been presented as a means to introduce further cost-efficiencies, reduce configuration and management overheads, and rapidly increase an application's ability to speed up, scale up and scale down in the cloud. The potential of this new computation model is reflected in the introduction of serverless computing platforms by the main hyperscale cloud service providers. This paper provides an overview and multi-level feature analysis of seven enterprise serverless computing platforms. It reviews extant research on these platforms and identifies the emergence of AWS Lambda as a de facto base platform for research on enterprise serverless cloud computing. The paper concludes with a summary of avenues for further research.
As signals of internal control weaknesses, cyber security incidents can represent significant risk factors to the quality of financial reporting. We empirically assess the audit quality implications of data breaches for a large sample of US firms. Using a difference-in-difference approach based on a matched sample of breached and non-breached firms, we find no evidence that cyber-security incidents result in a decline in audit quality. Instead, we observe positive shifts in four widely-used proxies for audit quality. We document that breached firms (i) experience a decrease in abnormal accruals, (ii) are less likely to report small profits or small earnings increases, (iii) are more likely to be issued a going concern report, and (iv) are less likely to restate their financial statements in the two years following a breach. Our results indicate that auditors effectively offset increases in audit risk through additional substantive testing and audit effort. Our evidence supports the view that auditors have increased their audit risk awareness and put in place adequate procedures to deal with the consequences of cyber-security incidents.
1 January 2019 in Research in International Business and Finance
Over 2.8 million people die each year from being overweight or obese, a largely preventable disease. Social media has fundamentally changed the way we communicate, collaborate, consume, and create content. The ease with which content can be shared has resulted in a rapid increase in the number of individuals or organisations that seek to influence opinion and the volume of content that they generate. The nutrition and diet domain is not immune to this phenomenon. Unfortunately, from a public health perspective, many of these ‘influencers’ may be poorly qualified in order to provide nutritional or dietary guidance, and advice given may be without accepted scientific evidence and contrary to public health policy. In this preliminary study, we analyse the ‘healthy diet’ discourse on Twitter. While using a multi-component analytical approach, we analyse more than 1.2 million English language tweets over a 16-month period in order to identify and characterise the influential actors and discover topics of interest in the discourse. Our analysis suggests that the discourse is dominated by non-health professionals. There is widespread use of bots that pollute the discourse and seek to create a false equivalence on the efficacy of a particular nutritional strategy or diet. Topic modelling suggests a significant focus on diet, nutrition, exercise, weight, disease, and quality of life. Public health policy makers and professional nutritionists need to consider what interventions can be taken in order to counteract the influence of non-professional and bad actors on social media.