Banking in the cloud: Part 3 – contractual issues

Dear Cloud, I Think We Have Trust Issues: Cloud Computing Contracts and Trust

“…CSPs, reflecting a general practice in the wider IT industry, attempt to minimise their liability for any loss-direct, indirect, or consequentialthat may arise from the provision of the service. In cloud computing, indemnities and liabilities are usually related to privacy and security breaches and resulting data loss, data misuse and associated regulatory penalties, but may also include service interruptions or outages, or otherwise failing to meet agreed service levels (Hon and Millard 2018;Leimbach et al 2014;Bradshaw et al 2013). It should be noted that CSPs, typically attempt to compensate, where possible, for underperformance through service credits.…”

“…However against the backdrop of data protection legislation, deleting personal data as soon as possible may be prudent to mitigate GDPR-related risk. At the same time, Hon and Millard (2018) have suggested that regulators are seeking maximum periods after which personal data must be deleted. Leimbach et al (2014) also note that clients should understand what happens to metadata relating to their account on termination; this issue would seem to be contentious not only from a termination perspective but also from an ownership perspective and is worthy of attention by cloud clients.…”

An exploration of high performance computing cloud contract for SMEs: a systematic literature review

“…Improve risk management ability: This confirmed jurisdiction and applicable law prior to sign the contract Radhika and Sadasivam (2021) Improve service management skills: This discussed how to choose cloud service provider (CSP) and proposed a service management index (SMI) which include five factors as the parameters to select CSP The five factors are: performance, cloud availability, cost, scalability and reliability Wang et al (2013) Improve service management skills: This mentioned that multiple purchase is cheaper than single purchase and reminded that the contract time will affect the final price Kamarinou et al (2016) Improve risk management skills: This analysed 20 cloud providers' term and privacy policy to give a clear information in terms of what a privacy policy cover, how data were collected and used and how the personal data were shared between different actors Rodrigues et al (2012) Improve service management skills: It proposed four actions for multiple providers service management They are: (I) to foster client and service provider interoperability; (II) to manage network service contracts, promoting the dynamic negotiation between parties; (III) to access and query SLA/SLSs data on an individual or aggregated basis to assist service provisioning in the network; and (IV) to sustain service monitoring and auditing Shojaiemehr et al (2019) Improve contract negotiation ability: It proposed TPO (negotiation time, preferences of negotiators and opponent's behaviour) negotiation strategy and considered four negotiation parameters which were price, response time, availability and reliability Gold (2015) Improve contract negotiation ability: SLA is an important element that should be negotiated carefully before sign the contract This paper proposed three criteria for setting SLA which can be objectively measured without difficulty, truly reflect the performance and within the control of the service providers if their performance was measured This paper also outlined nine key points to set SLA which were : a, establish metric categories; b, establish measurement systems; c, set metric level; d, determine financial consequences; e, decide how to handle infrequent occurrences; f, avoid agreements to agree; g, carefully formulate automatic adjustments; h, use comprehensive reporting; and i, tailor each SLA to its services Hon and Millard (2018) Understand the SMEs' need: This paper pointed out that awareness should be improved if customer wanted to get access to cloud service Even the challenges of access cloud exist, they can always find a way to overcome obstacles Improve risk management ability: the paper reminded that the cloud risk management should be included in the overall risk governance Ryan and Loeffler (2010) Improve risk management ability: This examines the contract issues related with cloud computing It emphasized that the evaluation before sign the contract was necessary when weighing the trade-off between the benefits and risks Wu et al (2017) Understand SMEs' need: This paper provided a computational framework for SMEs to facilitate realtime sensing, monitoring and prognosis and prognosis for HPC from the technological perspective However, it elaborated the need for SMEs to access the HPC through cloud What the SMEs' need were the hardware and software systems for large volume data ...…”

Whose Fault is It? Correctly Attributing Outages in Cloud Services

“…This is particularly relevant, since such measurements can be employed to enforce the contractual obligations contained in the SLA and the legal dispute that may arise, a danger that has been dreaded in [6]. Actually, the liability of the cloud provider in the case of obligations related to service malfunctioning has been mentioned as a major obstacle to the wide adoption of the cloud by banks [25]; the same has been reported for the semiconductor industry [ Fig. 2: Cloud state sequence the network rather than the cloud, the cloud availability is actually underestimated, and the cloud provider may incur undue penalties.…”