This past week http://www.cloud-council.org/released a practical guide to cloud SLA’s. It is a good guide that looks at 10 steps to evaluate cloud service level agreements found here (Cloud SLA).
Online you can find various calculators and planning tools to help identify and define the various properties and areas of concern with SLA”s .
What we don’t see a lot of and I will start pull information together on and consolidate, is the implications of international law with respect to cloud computing.
What happens when you do business with China? http://doingbusinessinchina.theatlantic.com/
Does the SLA specify where cloud service transactions will take place? Should it?
What kind of legal implications are there doing business in the cloud?
What are the costs of having legal representation overseas?
What about downtime? How much will it cost to have more than one company with managed services?
How many companies have lawyers involved during the evaluation and purchase phase of acquiring cloud services?
How many companies have shadow IT involved in cloud services without even knowing the implications?
What about the US Government? How many experts are actively engaged at the program or project level in understanding the implications of cloud resources?
Over the next few months I am going to put together some short blogs asking some of these questions and looking to see what I can come up with from the cloud consumer perspective.
We need to understand what legal questions to ask as well as the technical questions. SLA’s are heavily weighted to the providers today and that will need to change in order to meet the needs of service consumers.
Take a look a these consideration from cloudbus
What it does say is you can terminate the agreement, what it doesn’t say is what happens to your business or your work.
Cloud Software License Agreement -(Altered from here)
Bloodthirsty Cloud License Agreement
————————————-
This is where the bloodthirsty license agreement is supposed to go,explaining that Interactive Cloudflow is a copyrighted service licensed for use by a single person, and sternly warning you not to use it with more than one person explaining, in detail, the gory consequences if you
do.
We know that you are an honest person, and are not going to go around sharing services of Interactive Cloudflow; this is just as well with us since we worked hard to perfect it. While you may understand that you do
not have the right to do anything with our service.
We have the right to do anything we want with your data and whatever resources you place on our servers. What is even better is that you have no idea who is looking at your data outside of the permissions you have agreed to. Our administrators, managers and engineers including anyone we describe outside of those people can get to your information without you knowing. That is acceptable to us.
If we find value in your data or “software code” we will take it and resell it at our discretion. We will also do our best to figure out what information that you place on our services will benefit our business and we will use that to potentially undermine your business.
At no time will we offer you any protection but we guarentee that your services will have an uptime of 99.999% without fail. If for some reason the service goes down, you can easily reach us at the beach or in my house. I will be there, just call.
The Cohenization Project 