Cloud providers viability: How to address it from an IT and legal perspective?

Abstract

A major part of the commercial Internet is moving toward the cloud paradigm. This phenomenon has a drastic impact on the organizational structures of enterprizes and introduces new challenges that must be properly addressed to avoid major setbacks. One such challenge is that of cloud provider viability, that is, the reasonable certainty that the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) will not go out of business, either by filing for bankruptcy or by simply shutting down operations, thus leaving its customers stranded without an infrastructure and, depending on the type of cloud service used, even without their applications or data. This article attempts to address the issue of cloud provider viability, defining a possible way of modeling viability as a non-functional requirement and proposing some approaches that can be used to mitigate the problem, both from a technical and from a legal perspective. By introducing a structured perspective into the topic of cloud viability, describing the risks, factors and possible mitigators, the contribution of this work is twofold: it gives the customer a better understanding to determine when it can rely on the cloud infrastructure on the long term and what precautions it should take in any case, and provides the CSP with means to address some of the viability issues and thus increase its customers’ trust.