Ashish Agarwal – Freelance Salesforce.com, Force.com & Oracle Application Express Professional

Gartner Global IT Council for Cloud Services has come up with six rights and one responsibility that you should have a customer when using cloud computing for your IT requirements. The full article is available here. Here is a brief snapshot of these rights & responsibilities.

• Right 1: The right to retain ownership, use and control one’s own data
• Right 2: The right to service-level agreements that address liabilities, remediation and business outcomes
• Right 3: The right to notification and choice about changes that affect the service consumers’ business processes
• Right 4: The right to understand the technical limitations or requirements of the service up front
• Right 5: The right to understand the legal requirements of jurisdictions in which the provider operates
• Right 6: The right to know what security processes the provider follows
• Responsibility: The responsibility to understand and adhere to software license requirements

Personally, I think this framework makes a lot of sense for the customers and service providers. With cloud computing slated to grow many-fold in coming years, it will be good to have these set of guidelines. Probably taking it a step further will be to certify the cloud computing service providers based on these basic parameters, i.e. something on the lines of ISO certification. This will ensure that the service provider is operating within a basic set of framework formulated by industry experts and will help customers in choosing the correct service provider.

Read the full article by James Harris and Steven Nunn where they highlight the benefits of cloud computing .

If you are not using cloud for your IT requirements you are missing something. Use IT in your business, minus its headaches with cloud computing.