Cloud Service Level Agreements

Cloud Service Level Agreements

How solid is your cloud?  Service Level Agreements can be nebulous in this emerging area.  While you would never expect a bank to provide you a separate building for your safe deposit box, neither would you expect your bank account to be frozen if an investigation were underway on a different client of the bank.  Nor should your safe deposit box be taken away for inspection based only on its proximity to a neighboring box.

“Where is the firestorm that should be building? Most customers want to talk about public and private cloud but when I bring up the legal side I get blank stares half the time….

The legal party is heating up around “Guarantees” – like what will, and what will not be guaranteed a consumer of cloud services by the provider?

  • Will they guarantee where your data is?
  • Will they guarantee that the regulations of your home area will be applied to their services delivered from another part of the world?
  • Will they guarantee up-time, privacy, security, bandwidth, or anything having to do with living up to your expectations?” from Legal Eagles And The Cloud: What Would Denny Crane Do?.

A June 2011 police raid seized a server from a Reston, Virginia service provider. In this case, you have to worry about coincidence.  By sheer bad luck, is the investigation targeting the same physical server where your firm was hosting its site and business data? The commenting lawyer says points out that this is “bad news if your website shared the servers seized by Law Enforcement. That seizure means (i) your website is down, and (ii) your business information (the information on the server) is in the hands of folks that you do not have a confidentiality agreement with.” from Server Seizer Leads To Unwanted Consequences : DC Metropolitan Business Law Alert : Washington D.C. Corporate Lawyers & Attorneys : Kelley Drye Law Firm.

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