Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

3. Data Regulations: Each jurisdiction around the world has slightly different approaches to the regulation of data privacy and the Australian Law Reform Commission has recently released a report suggesting significant strengthening of Australia's data privacy regime. Therefore it is important that customers understand where their data will ultimately be stored and by whom so that they can ensure compliance with Australian privacy and also record retention regulations. Many SaaS providers work on the basis of centralised infrastructure that is not based in Australia. The customer must ensure that contractually the provider is bound to comply with Australian privacy laws before allowing the data to be exported. The issue is further compounded if the SaaS provider then uses a third party to do the storage of the data. Such is the complexity that EMC announced recently that it is having difficulty choosing a location to build the data centres to run its storage-as-a-service offering...

Good read this: It is virtually impossible for a cloud vendor to offer a strong SLA for two reasons. First, the cost advantage of the cloud is based on shared resources, although IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ) is now pushing the idea of creating and running private clouds for its large customers. But even if a cloud is private, the fact that many applications are running on a shared infrastructure increases the risk of catastrophe. The second reason is that offering a really strong SLA, one that covers the lost revenue from an outage, is just too risky. It means putting the vendor's entire enterprise at risk, essentially selling a form of insurance on the cheap. That's why in the cloud and elsewhere, SLAs will never be that strong. Without SLAs to provide much comfort, the real remedy to managing catastrophic outages is redundancy. If your cloud infrastructure fails for a critical system, you must be able to bring up a redundant infrastructure that performs the same funct...