Crisis in the clouds – what to do if your service provider goes bust

Like businesses across all sectors of the economy, cloud service providers are far from immune to the worst ravages of the recession.

But when a provider does go bust what happens to the businesses that have put their faith, money and resources in finding a suitable partner and are now threatened with losing services, resources and data as a result of their collapse?

For many organisations, the main challenge is: when their data is held in the cloud; how do they retain control and ownership of it when their service provider goes under – and how easy is it to transfer that data to another service provider? Just as importantly: what mechanisms does the existing provider have in place to protect them if the worst does happen?

Typically, when organisations acquire on-premise software, it is written into their contract that they get control of the code in the event that the ...