Response to consultation on recommendations on outsourcing to cloud service providers
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There are only two points we felt need to be expanded on -
1. We would recommend that statements regarding location of ‘data’ should also explicitly include backups and disaster recovery/business continuity provision. Whilst this may be implied it is not specifically mentioned that these are of equal importance, especially when potential sub contractors are also used by the provider.
2. We are somewhat wary of how realistic it might be to carry out a rehearsal of the Exit processes agreed in an Exit Strategy prior to committing to a provider, as you plan to recommend.
Exit Strategies could range from defining agreed data formatting/extract requirements through to a full platform migration, as the majority of the major Cloud providers’ functionality is delivered through applications that are inherently proprietary to each provider. Therefore exiting to an alternative Cloud provider could be problematic and as a result difficult to rehearse before even moving to a Cloud Provider in the first place.
Question 1: Are the provisions from these recommendations clear and sufficiently detailed to be used in the context of cloud outsourcing?
In the main, the provisions are very good indeed and well detailed.There are only two points we felt need to be expanded on -
1. We would recommend that statements regarding location of ‘data’ should also explicitly include backups and disaster recovery/business continuity provision. Whilst this may be implied it is not specifically mentioned that these are of equal importance, especially when potential sub contractors are also used by the provider.
2. We are somewhat wary of how realistic it might be to carry out a rehearsal of the Exit processes agreed in an Exit Strategy prior to committing to a provider, as you plan to recommend.
Exit Strategies could range from defining agreed data formatting/extract requirements through to a full platform migration, as the majority of the major Cloud providers’ functionality is delivered through applications that are inherently proprietary to each provider. Therefore exiting to an alternative Cloud provider could be problematic and as a result difficult to rehearse before even moving to a Cloud Provider in the first place.