What Do Cloud Vendors Want, Part 2?

Last month, I wrote about part of my recent conversation with in-house counsel from several major public Canadian and U.S. cloud vendors in connection to the Canadian IT Law Association's Annual Meeting in October. Here are some more thoughts from them on the big issues surrounding cloud computing.

Standards

While most financial institutions and governments now want to see their cloud vendors comply with various security standards, and in fact many large vendors agree to do so in their marketing materials, fewer are willing to represent and warrant compliance with such standards in their contracts.

Part of the problem here is cloud computing standards are still in their infancy and many are in their draft phase. Also, there is a veritable alphabet soup of standards/associations in this space, including the CSA (Cloud Security Alliance), ENISA (European Network and Information Security Agency), INCITS (International Committee for Information Technology Standards),