SearchCIO: Time to lay down the cloud computing law for uptime

With the major standards bodies working out identity management and security and portability in the cloud, the industry has turned its attention to another matter: cloud computing law and order — in particular, the lack of jurisprudence as to who pays for what when an outage occurs.

“Providers can build the best clouds out there, with high availability, performance and price; but every cloud provider goes down,” said Drue Reeves, director of research at Burton Group in Midvale, Utah. “When that happens, who owns the liability? The consumer, the provider? We don’t have enough jurisprudence to decide who pays for that.” Public clouds service the mass market with standard service-level agreements (SLA) rather than individual agreements. Most of them will pay for time lost during a service interruption, but not for valuable business lost, he said.

More of the SearchCIO article from Laura Smith

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.