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January 18, 2010 By Steve Towns, Editor
computing, especially in the government space, Orzechowski said.
"As you have more and more customers going to certain cloud providers, and those providers become bigger and are housing more data, they'll become bigger targets for hackers and terrorists," he said. "What will happen the first time there's a real big hit, especially if there's government data housed with that vendor? A terrorist or major hacker attack is a test that in the back of everyone's mind may be coming."
The last point to cover during contract negotiations is what happens when the deal is over. How will you get your data out of one vendor's cloud and into another, or back into your own data center?
"There's been talk among some of the big players on having data standards for the cloud space. As a consumer, you are probably are very interested in that," Orzechowski said. "You want to have your data in a form that can easily be ported over to a new vendor. It may not always be in your current vendor's interest to allow for this because they want to keep you captive."
The key is to avoid being held hostage, he said.
"This is something to think about when you're negotiating. What is the template, what are the data sets and how are the fields defined? Get a sense of this and understand it," Orzechowski recommended. "From there, negotiate for migration assistance. Find out how the vendor will help you move to someone else, and how much they'll charge to do that."
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