Detailed cloud SLAs alleviate information risk, boost data recovery

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Ben Cole.

When a business acquires a cloud service, its first line of risk defense is the cloud contract’s service-level agreement – and rightly so, as a strong cloud SLA will become increasingly vital to business operations in coming years.  Fifty-five percent of CIOs believe they will cloud source all of their critical applications and operations by 2020, according to a recent survey by Stamford, Conn.-based consultancy Gartner Inc. That will have major implications in many business areas, and force IT to manage the risks associated with cloud SLAs.

"The reason we want to buy into cloud computing is because its flexible, it’s scalable, it’s on demand, it’s less expensive," said Gartner Research vice president Jay Heiser at the Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit in National Harbor, Md., in June. "How is that provisioned? By having access to appropriate levels of processing and storage when they are needed and as available."…

Heiser was part of a presentation on cloud service provider risk management during the Gartner Summit. Despite growing business criticality of certain cloud applications, the presenters said they have seen numerous cloud contracts that omit serious considerations, such as performance service-level guarantees…

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