Jurisdiction:
Cloud providers often don’t specify where jurisdiction lies with regards to the contract being signed.
This could prove to be a major issue should there be a disagreement between two parties. Amazon for instance state that any dispute which is over $7500 should be settled in the Federal Court in Kings Country Washington.
IBM being slightly more reasonable in this area settle any dispute in the region where the contract was agreed.
Term Variation:
Many service providers out there have the ability to adjust contracts at their own discretion. Sometimes this is through simply uploading an updated version on their website.
IBM for instance tell their customers to periodically review their contract terms online!
Trans border data flows:
Companies such as Telstra state that data may be transmitted overseas to other countries where differing privacy laws are in place. This means they are basically outsourcing their storage to external suppliers.
Telstra states that they: “cannot control how suppliers or their suppliers will use, store or disclose your personal data.” Outstanding.
Security:
The majority of Cloud providers take no responsibility for the security of data, even when the security of that data is out of the customer’s control.
IBM state that customers are “solely responsible for procedures and controls regarding encryption and backup.”
“We have no liability to you for any unauthorised access or use, corruption, deletion, destruction or loss of any of your content and applications.”
Potential customers must be wary of misleading marketing statements such as that made by Google which claims “when you trust your company’s information to us, you can be confident that your critical information is safe and secure.”
Huge disparity in contracts:
It is extremely important to do your due diligence before signing up to a Cloud provider. Even when contracts are supposedly comparable, SLAs can vary hugely.
Downtime:
Services which supposedly guarantee 100% uptime are often slightly misleading.
As such one provider, Softlayer only gives its customers credits when downtime has been over 30 minutes. Even with multiple instances of 25 minute downtime, the client is not entitled to any compensation.
Transition Out:
Finally the situation may be complex if the customer wishes to change cloud providers or wishes to delete their data from a provider’s systems.
Generally there is no set format for data deletion and many contracts do not provide details as to what happens at the end of an agreement.
