Background: With the immense significance of cloud computing over the decade, different IT companies offer varieties of cloud services. Objective: The selection of cloud services from the expanding range of Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) makes it difficult for the Cloud Consumers (CCs) to choose a CSP based on their preferences. Methods: In this context, this paper proposes an efficient trust management architecture for cloud service selection and put forward Combined Preference Ranking Algorithm (CPRA) for initial ranking of CSPs and their services before doing any transaction in the past based on CCs requirements. Results: The proposed trust management architecture prompts the CSPs to improve the Quality of Service (QoS) by adhering to Service Level Agreement (SLA). Conclusion: The experimental results show that compared with other ranking approaches CPRA generates the accurate ranking list of CSPs with minimal execution time. © 2020 Bentham Science Publishers.