Negotiating cloud contracts: A new era for CIOs
October 9, 2015
Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Dina Gerdeman.
As cloud spending grows, providers are easing up on the ‘my way or the highway’ approach. Here’s how to negotiate a cloud contract with terms and conditions that work for your enterprise. CIO Cynthia Nustad remembers the early days of the cloud, when IT didn’t have much wiggle room in negotiating cloud contracts.
Seven years ago or so, the vast majority of cloud service providers offered a standard cookie-cutter contract to businesses, said Nustad, CIO at HMS, a healthcare management services company. Many providers balked at accepting any real liability, and they certainly shied away from signing what is known in the healthcare industry as a business associate agreement, which has the provider assuming some shared risk in the event of a data breach…
It was enough to make many CIOs squirm at the thought of signing a cloud contract — and Nustad, who was an IT leader for another company in the healthcare industry at the time, ultimately decided to walk away. "Those first movers really dictated the contract," she said. "Maybe you could negotiate on price or add-ons, but the core service was pretty vanilla and hardened. It was, ‘You can sign here, and that’s your only choice.’ Back then, we just couldn’t do it. The cost of data breaches were so high, we couldn’t go in that direction."…
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