CSO

With all the talk these days about cloud computing, SAAS, and ASPs, we see much focus on ensuring data entrusted to these vendors is adequately secured. This usually covers the first two letters in the well-known CIA acronym (i.e., Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability), but the service levels for these vendors - the all important availability, response time, and other performance requirements - are frequently very thin. Given the recent, highly publicized downtime at several of the most well known vendors in this space, I thought it might be useful to highlight some of the key elements to be considered in drafting effective service levels agreements (SLAs):