Venyu Blog

I’m pretty sure this wasn’t what the founding fathers had in mind when they came up with the Bill of Rights.

But then again, 220 years ago there wasn’t anything known as cloud computing.

Recently, the Gartner Group and its Global IT Council released a list of “Six Rights and One Responsibility” that “will enable providers and consumers to work more productively together,” notes a Gartner press release.

The abbreviated version of the list follows (the unabridged version is available here):

• The right to retain ownership, use and control one’s own data: The provider must specify what it can do with the consumer’s data. Lack of clarity on this point can lead to costly legal battles.
• The right to service-level agreements that address liabilities, remediation and business outcomes: To make service-level agreements relevant to the business, providers do not have to customize them for every consumer; rather, the agreements should comprehensively address the business issues implied in the type of service offered.
• The right to notification and choice about changes that affect the service consumers’ business processes: Protecting the consumer’s business processes entails providing advanced notification of major upgrades or system changes, and granting the consumer some control over when it makes the switch.
• The right to understand the technical limitations or requirements of the service up front: Most service providers do not fully explain their own systems, technical requirements and limitations so that after consumers have committed to a cloud service, they run the risk of not being able to adjust to major changes, at least not without a big investment.
• The right to understand the legal requirements of jurisdictions in which the provider operates: Service providers have not done a good job of explaining which jurisdictions they put data in and what legal requirements the service consumer must, therefore, meet.
• The right to know what security processes the provider follows: Service consumers must understand the processes a provider uses, so that security at one level (such as the server) does not subvert security at another level (such as the network). Without this knowledge, service consumers risk security violations caused solely by the provider not accounting for the ways in which consumers might use a service.
• The responsibility to understand and adhere to software license requirements: Providers and consumers must come to an understanding about how the proper use of software licenses will be assured.

In its press release Gartner writes “Respecting these rights will require effort and expense from providers, but securing the rights will encourage enterprises to put more of their business into the cloud. However, the seven rights will not become a reality unless enterprises insist on them when they negotiate with service providers.”

While they’re not exactly something James Madison, who introduced the U.S. Bill of Rights to the First United States Congress would have likely championed, I believe any time you hold both users and vendors accountable for one another’s actions it’s another meaningful step towards cloud computing freedom for them both.