Abstract
A major part of the commercial Internet is moving towards a cloud paradigm. This phenomenon has a drastic impact on the organizational structures of enterprises and introduces new challenges that must be properly addressed to avoid major setbacks. One such challenge is that of cloud provider viability, that is, the reasonable certainty that the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) will not go out of business, either by filing for bankruptcy or by simply shutting down operations, thus leaving its customers stranded without an infrastructure and, depending on the type of cloud service used, even without their applications or data. This article attempts to address the issue of cloud provider viability, proposing some ways of mitigating the problem both from a technical and from a legal perspective.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The reference example is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/).
- 2.
Such as Google App Engine (https://appengine.google.com/start) or the Salesforce1 platform (http://www.salesforce.com/platform/solutions/connect-integrate/).
- 3.
- 4.
Other definitions of Service Level Agreement (SLAs) exist. According to [22], SLAs are “a common way to formally specify the exact conditions (both functional and non-functional) under which services are or should be delivered”.
- 5.
Information about the group can be found at https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/cloud-select-industry-group-service-level-agreements.
- 6.
Luxembourgish Code of commerce, Article 567.
- 7.
References
Anthony, S.: Megaupload’s demise: what happens to your files when a cloud service dies? January 2012. http://www.extremetech.com/computing/114803-megauploads-demise-what-happens-to-your-files-when-a-cloud-service-dies
Bauer, E., Adams, R.: Reliability and Availability of Cloud Computing, 1st edn. Wiley-IEEE Press, Hoboken (2012)
Bowen, J.A.: Legal issues in cloud computing. In: Buyya, R., Broberg, J., Goscinski, A.M. (eds.) Cloud Computing: Principles and Paradigms, 1st edn, pp. 593–613. Wiley, Hoboken (2011). Chap. 24
Brodkin, J.: Gartner: seven cloud-computing security risks. Technical report, Gartner, July 2008
Butler, B.: The best time to prepare for getting data out of the cloud isbefore you put it in there, June 2014. http://www.networkworld.com/article/2173255/cloud-computing/cloud-s-worst-case-scenario-what-to-do-if-your-provider-goes-belly-up.html
Caplan, D.S.: Bankruptcy in the cloud: effects of bankruptcy by a cloudservices provider. Technical report, Law Offices of David S. Caplan, 1289 FordhamBlvd., Suite 345 Chapel Hill, NC 37514, USA, August 2010. http://ftp.documation.com/references/ABA10a/PDfs/3_3.pdf
Cloud Select Industry Group on Service Level Agreements (C-SIG SLA), Brussels: Cloud Service Level Agreement Standardisation Guidelines, June 2014. http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/newsroom/cf/dae/document.cfm?action=display&doc_id=6138
Dowell, S., Barreto, A., Michael, J.B., Shing, M.T.: Cloud to cloud interoperability. In: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on System of Systems Engineering (SoSE), pp. 258–263. IEEE, Albuquerque, June 2011
Harsh, P., Dudouet, F., Cascella, R.G., Jegou, Y., Morin, C.: Using open standards for interoperability - issues, solutions, and challenges facing cloud computing. In: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM) and 6th International DMTF Academic Alliance Workshop on Systems and Virtualization Management: Standards and the Cloud (SVM), pp. 435–440. IEEE, Las Vegas, October 2012
Hiles, A.: Service Level Agreements: Winning a Competitive Edge for Support & Supply Services. Rothstein Associates Inc., Brookfield (2000). Rothstein Catalog on Service Level Books
Hu, F., Qiu, M., Li, J., Grant, T., Tylor, D., McCaleb, S., Butler, L., Hamner, R.: A review on cloud computing: design challenges in architecture and security. J. Comput. Inf. Technol. 19(1), 25–55 (2011)
Louwers, E.J.: Continuity in the cloud: new practical solutions required. In: iTechLaw 2013 European Conference, October 2013
Machado, G.S., Hausheer, D., Stiller, B.: Considerations on the interoperability of and between cloud computing standards. In: 27th OpenGrid Forum (OGF27), G2C-Net Workshop: From Grid to Cloud Networks, OGF, Banff, Canada, October 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.5167/uzh-24316
McKendrick, J.: What to do in case your cloud provider falls off the grid, November 2013. http://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2013/11/04/what-to-do-in-case-your-cloud-provider-falls-off-the-grid/
Mills, L.H.: Legal issues associated with cloud computing, May 2009. http://www.secureit.com/resources/Cloud%20Computing%20Mills%20Nixon%20Peabody%205-09.pdf
Pappous, P.A.: The software escrow: the court favorite and bankruptcy law. St. Clara High Technol. Law J. 1(2), 309–326 (1985)
Peltz, C.: Web services orchestration and choreography. Computer 36(10), 46–52 (2003)
Thibodeau, P.: One in four cloud providers will be gone by 2015, December 2013. http://www.computerworld.com/article/2486691/cloud-computing/one-in-four-cloud-providers-will-be-gone-by-2015.html
Van Hoboken, J., Arnbak, A., Van Eijk, N.: Obscured by clouds or how to address governmental access to cloud data from abroad. In: Proceedings of the 6th Annual Privacy Law Scholars Conference (PLSC), June 2013
Venkatraman, A.: 2e2 datacentre administrators hold customers’ data to 1m ransom, February 2013. http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240177744/2e2-datacentre-administrators-hold-customers-data-to-1m-ransom
Weber, R.H., Staiger, D.N.: Cloud computing: a cluster of complex liability issues. Web J. Curr. Leg. Issues 20(1) (2014). http://webjcli.org/article/view/303
Wieder, P., Butler, J.M., Theilmann, W., Yahyapour, R. (eds.): Service Level Agreements for Cloud Computing. Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, New York (2011)
van de Zande, T., Jansen, S.: Business continuity solutions for SaaS customers. In: Regnell, B., van de Weerd, I., De Troyer, O. (eds.) ICSOB 2011. LNBIP, vol. 80, pp. 17–31. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Bartolini, C., El Kateb, D., Le Traon, Y., Hagen, D. (2016). Cloud Providers Viability: How to Address it from an IT and Legal Perspective?. In: Altmann, J., Silaghi, G., Rana, O. (eds) Economics of Grids, Clouds, Systems, and Services. GECON 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9512. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43177-2_19
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43177-2_19
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-43176-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-43177-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)