6 ‘Golden Rules' When Reviewing Cloud Contracts

More and more businesses are relying on cloud computing - for their own use and to provide their services to end customers. However, cloud computing can be a complex and fast-moving technology, and gives rise to a number of legal issues that parties need to address. While most cloud customers will see data protection and security as an obvious priority, in this article we explore some of the other legal challenges businesses should consider when reviewing a cloud contract.

What is cloud computing?

In broad terms, cloud computing delivers technology as a service on demand, over the internet. In other words, a customer does not need to install stand-alone software or run its own applications and servers. The cloud supplier hosts applications and provides the computing power to many different customers from the supplier's data centres. This allows each customer to benefit from economies of scale and dramatically lowers the costs of obtaining a range of IT services.