As your business continuity planners work on their 2010 projects, you may be facing an organizational decision soon regarding whether or not you will move to the current “Cloud Computing” environment.

To help your teams prepare for that situation, you should read a recent article posted on the Network Computing website.  In this article, written by Satish Joshi, and as one of the very first considerations for a company to review, he goes on to state,

“It is therefore of paramount importance to decide what exactly you are trying to do by ‘moving computing into the cloud.’ The computing cloud can be viewed at three different levels of abstraction:

• At the bottom level, the cloud is simply a virtualized data center that offers you variable capacity for computing, storage, communications etc
• At the middle level, the cloud is a whole platform including the middleware (apps servers, ESB, etc) and a complete application development environment
• At the top level, the cloud actually provides complete business process functionality with variable capacity and service levels on demand. Your roadmap and cost benefit equations will be completely different depending which layers you wish to utilize.”

Click here to read more about this current topic so relevant to the needs of today’s business continuity and risk management team members.

Cloud computing has been in the news again for having an outage on Sept 1, 2009.   In an article by Christina Torode, a contributing writer for IT Knowledge Exchange, the issue of losing track or control of your organization’s data, when the cloud computing is not available remains a serious risk management question not yet answered.

All business continuity planners and risk managers responsible for information security and IT Service Management in every organization should be aware of this element of cloud computing risk.

Click here for more information.

Linda Tucci, Senior News Writer at SearchCIO.com has written an article addressing the complaince requirements in Cloud Computing contracts.  The current industry buzz about cloud computing often involves issues of integration for enterprises, compliance strategies and best practices.  However, we have not seen enough discussions about the topic relevant to contract negotiations and legal issues.  

Click here to read this article.