Cloud security - Know your Risk and Roles in Cloud Contracts Terms & Conditions for Negotiations

A word ?Cloud computing? revolves around every technology savvy user and top management or decision making professional in enterprise regardless of industries and end-users. The reason that drives these buzz is cost saving opportunities and scalability which is a tough task for the organizations in current physical IT Infrastructure, now it can be achieved and delivered through a model called ?cloud?. When the IT consumer receives the cloud with great greet and enthusiasm, the concern raised among the buyers ?Security?. Buyers had an argument that to achieve cost saving and scalability we cannot lose our data and client informations which they handle which can led them to level of legal and even can end up in losing major revenue. Even though consumers are skeptical about cloud adoption but it cannot be ignored forever due to increasing in IT budgets and dynamic business environment. Amazon Web Services cut down cloud prices by 80% because they feared NSA?s revelations would turn customers away. However, in reality, the losses were fairly marginal. Even though this particular problem angled towards the suppliers, there is an equal opportunity and responsibility for the consumers end to ensure they can extract security out of the suppliers. Yes, by defining and demanding the appropriate ?Cloud Contract?. This white paper will cover the various issues and challenges a client might face in cloud and what are the security steps should be consider before and during signing a contract and how these issues can impact the end cloud solutions such as SaaS, IaaS and PaaS. Problem Statement & Solution: There are multiple reasons and concerns that stop the enterprises in cloud adoption. But still cloud market seems to grow in good pace; it clearly indicates the cloud cannot be ignored. Even though there are various arguments about the issues and challenges cloud is capable of delivering multiple opportunities for the enterprises. It also indicates enterprises are moving in to a cloud by compromising certain requirements such as moving non critical applications to cloud. According to a 2013 SIM IT Trends Study, IT security ranks as the second-highest priority for IT leaders, yet is the 14th largest IT investment.