Yankee report finds many problematic areas with cloud computing vendors

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Market research firm Yankee Group recently conducted a report on the offerings, agreements and services provided by cloud computing vendors and found several problems.

Among issues the company found were suspect service-level agreements, which only half of surveyed vendors even offer. For those that do, none of these agreements offered clients any compensation if their services violated any of the agreed areas. If such violations occurred, clients received “limited reparation” other than the ability to terminate the existing contract.

In addition, while many vendors refer to their SAS-70 certification as proof of their compliance, Yankee found many to be shaky in this regard and recommends clients seek further credentials to ensure compliance. Lastly, many vendors provided self-assessment metrics to give to clients, rating their performance. Yankee found this practice to be suspect and advises customers to use third-party monitoring tools to get truly accurate reads.

With IT departments looking allocate their increased budgets - predicted by Gartner to jump 3.9 percent worldwide in 2010 - on cloud computing, surveying these problematic areas before adopting a solution could avoid future issues with the new technology or its provider.