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Some of these Cloud services are to be provided exclusively as enterprise‐
internal services. This applies in particular for sensitive corporate data from
development and sales, which are Clever Inc.'s most valuable assets. Other,
less mission‐critical Cloud services are to be obtained on the free market.
Cloud services that Clever Inc. will be offering to its customers as
commercial services under its own brand in the future should be provided
and operated by a reliable service provider.
In an additional project phase, existing IT applications should be tested to
discover whether they can be migrated to Cloud based platforms
retrospectively.
1.2.6
Conclusions
Max was a realist and entrepreneur. Of course, when the achievable effects
were explained to him in an intelligible and conclusive way, and it became
clear that the potential savings of IT‐costs were 20%, even with a pessimistic
forecast, Max was simply speechless. In the best case, and taking the
resulting effects into consideration, this potential might even be somewhere
in the region of 50%, a quantum leap into the future for Clever Inc.
He also wanted clarity in terms of the business risk for Clever Inc., after all,
the enterprise would depend on the reliability of the service providers.
Before reaching a final decision, he needed reliable answers, especially to
questions relating to legal considerations and compliance; he also needed
clarity in terms of the data protection requirements and the reliability of the
Cloud service providers involved.
He summarised his questions in an e‐mail to his friend and business
consultant Sam Smart and to his legal adviser, Leo Legal:
What service level guarantees can be given for Cloud based services?
What happens if Clever Inc. wants to move to a different Cloud
service provider sometime later?
How can we access the data we store in the Cloud?
Are there any assurances that the Cloud services provided will
continue to function and offer performance and permanent
availability despite fluctuating or strongly increasing use?
