Cloud Service Legal Agreement
To incorporate a cloud environment into your company, you need have to sign a cloud provider-submitted Service Level Agreement (SLA). An SLA comprises of the responsibility of the company and Customer concerning the use of the service (Modi, Chowdhury & Garg, 2018). The contract lets users know what the cloud provider implements and handles upfront. This also provides clients with an awareness of what they need to do to continue using the service. This form of agreement plays a vital role in ensuring a high degree of reliability, responsiveness and availability for a given network and applications, and specifies critical requirements to be followed in the event of service interruptions. This paper is therefore in a capacity to outline a shared understanding of the facilities, target areas, obligations and warranties that the service provider offers.
What are my responsibilities as the Customer? The SLA is a contract that specifies requirements agreed upon by both the provider and the consumer. “Your cloud provider needs to inform you of what you’re liable for when you enter the agreement” (Hein, 2020). It may be its section or scattered in the agreement, but the owner needs to inform you what is expected of you. Make sure you look through the whole SLA to know what your provider will be handling and what you as a customer need
Are there Backups and Disaster Recoveries set in place?. In the case of a crisis, the cloud provider should have a program set in place to mitigate complete data loss. Cloud providers should have an SLA section which describes their disaster backup and recovery solutions. “Recovery Point Objective” or “RPO” means the point in time to which Client Data has been backed up. The RPO will be specified in the Client Specifications, as amended from time to time” (Corserva, 2020). They can provide automated backups and snapshots of your files, depending upon the provider. When the consumer has to set up backup and recovery systems, this should be explained in the SLA. It does not explicitly state how to trigger them, but whether you need to trigger them or not, you should be conscious.
What are the Clouds’ hardware and Software used by the service provider? Your cloud provider needs to use hardware and software to run its services. The provider will outline the hardware on which the cloud services depend on, including servers and other tools. Knowing the equipment and software requirements of your Cloud will help you understand the details behind the design of your production environment. Moreover, it gives you details on what you need to train your workforce on.
Availability of the cloud-based services. The provider guarantees the central aspect of quality-of-service (QoS) to which should be protected in every SLA accessibility. Depending on the period, providers may break down availability – for instance, they may guarantee 99% accessibility during the operating period. Such terms will also include a plan for unforeseen downtime by the company, including alerting its customers and offering updates on upkeep and service repairs.
Who owns the data in the cloud-based service? The question of who owns your cloud data stored in the cloud service. That question prevents many businesses from jumping to the cloud, especially when they consider sensitive data. “Affirms your institution’s ownership of its data stored on the service provider’s system, and specifies your rights to get it back” (Wired, 2020). Specifically, an SLA will outline its data ownership policies, so it is straightforward and transparent. Ideally, an SLA will claim that all rights of ownership belong to the consumer. However, if the provider does not specifically mention its data ownership policy in the SLA, there is no guarantee that your information will be protected.
References
Corserva. (2020). Backup and Disaster Recovery Services Service Level Agreement. Retrieved 4 May 2020, from https://www.corserva.com/managed-backup-and-disaster-recovery-sla/
Hein, D. (2020). 5 Things to Look For in a Cloud Service Level Agreement. Retrieved 4 May 2020, from https://solutionsreview.com/cloud-platforms/5-things-to-look-for-in-a-cloud-service-level-agreement/
Modi, K. J., Chowdhury, D. P., & Garg, S. (2018). Automatic cloud service monitoring and management with prediction-based service provisioning. International Journal of Cloud Computing, 7(1), 65-82.
WIRED, S. (2020). Service Level Agreements in the Cloud: Who cares?. Retrieved 4 May 2020, from https://www.wired.com/insights/2011/12/service-level-agreements-in-the-cloud-who-cares/