Legal and Contractual Risks in Cloud Services

Everyone knows what’s good about cloud services, right? They’re IT outsourcing services gone virtual and on-demand. They’re cheap, flexible, fast and simple. Cloud services allow buyers to rapidly bring new business services online without having to sink significant capital into IT infrastructure, and to scale capacity up and down quickly and cheaply.

So what’s the catch? In a previous RapidInsight, HfS Research examined several of the most common IT security issues that cloud services entail. In this report, we look at a few pressing legal and contractual risks that cloud services can introduce, some with roots in the IT infrastructure underlying cloud services, others based on the ways in which providers build, sell and support these services.