Martin von Willebrand's Blog

I recently published an article on challenging structures or clauses in typical cloud contracts (in Finnish). In addition to going through these, I assert that most of these are due to the development of the business model. Thus we can expect many of these challenges to become less prominent in the future.

An already overcome example of a challenge is the question on SLAs: today one can purchase service level agreements at different levels, whereas a couple of years ago this was much less available. Today, it is difficult to get a service provider to (even against payment) give some guarantee on data preservation or backups. I think we can expect the services to develop to cover this, e.g. against extra payment.

Addition on 30 December 2010: Bradshaw, Simon, Millard, Christopher and Walden, Ian have made a great and detailed comparison of over 50 or so cloud service contracts and their terms.

Addition on 12 January 2011: Dennis van der Heijden has set up a good comparison on pricing practices covering 317 cloud service providers.