Guard yourself against loss when hit by cloud outage

Outages like the recent Amazon one could hit unwary customers but the best legal advice is to be prepared. When the Amazon outage was hitting the headlines a few weeks back the blogosphere was quickly filled by aggrieved customers complaining that their businesses had been hit and their finances had been seriously hit. There was much talk of suing Amazon for compensation over lost business.

But is this the answer? There's little doubt that the Amazon problems have hurt the cloud industry. It's clear that many of Amazon's customers thought they were entitled to more protection and to better compensation than they were in reality. Why is there this disconnect? And what can be done to ensure that cloud customers have peace of mind? This is the ideal time for customers to dust off their existing contracts with their cloud service providers (CSPs) and look in some detail at what they do and don't say. It’s also an opportunity for CSPs to stand out from the crowd by being transparent about what protections they’re willing to offer customers.

To read the rest of this article, originally published on CloudPro, including top tips for customer cloud contract negotiations, click here.