Cloud service contracts have evolved, but even in today’s more balanced landscape, key risks remain buried in the fine print. In “Beyond the Fine Print: Four Risks in Cloud Agreements,” Lisa R. Lifshitz highlights the often-overlooked dangers that can catch organizations off guard and offers practical advice for navigating them. Here are our takeaways from that article.
1. Frustrated Backups
Cloud vendors often make you responsible for data protection, but restrict the tools you need to actually perform it.
Many cloud vendors shift full responsibility for data backups to customers, while withholding the technical tools (like APIs) needed to actually perform them. Without explicit guarantees of access to backup and restore mechanisms, organizations risk losing data or failing regulatory requirements.
SaaSAssure performs secure, automated backups directly from the customer’s SaaS environments, ensuring data integrity, retention compliance, and recovery. This guarantees customers can restore data quickly and completely even when the provider restricts access or suffers downtime.
2. Who Has the Keys to Your Data?
Behind your SaaS provider may be a maze of third-party hosts and subcontractors, each introducing potential exposure.
Vendors frequently rely on third-party hosting providers such as AWS, but their contracts often disclaim responsibility for those partners’ actions. Customers must scrutinize these relationships, asking critical questions about encryption, key management, and liability coverage to ensure their data remains protected, even when held by subcontractors.
3. AI, Transparency, and Data Use
As AI becomes embedded in cloud services, many providers add vague or conflicting AI clauses that disclaim responsibility for how customer data is used. Businesses should demand clear “AI guardrails,” including rules around anonymization, ownership, and data usage rights, to prevent misuse of sensitive information.
4. “Hotel California” Exits
When it’s time to move on, too many cloud contracts make it nearly impossible to take your data with you.
Ending a cloud relationship can feel like checking out of the Hotel California: you can leave, but your data can’t. Too many contracts fail to specify exit procedures, data retrieval formats, or migration assistance. Clients should insist on a defined transition plan to ensure service continuity and full data recovery after termination.
SaaSAssure ensures data portability and clean exits through its on-demand recovery and export capabilities. Customers can retrieve all their data in usable, standards-based formats at any time, ensuring service continuity, clean migration, and compliance with retention and deletion policies after termination.
Key Takeaway
Cloud contracts have come a long way, but “trust and verify” remains essential. Work closely with legal, technical, and business teams to secure commitments that protect your organization’s data, continuity, and compliance at every stage of the cloud relationship. SaaSAssure mitigates these hidden cloud-contract risks by delivering independent, automated backup, transparent data protection, and seamless data portability that safeguard continuity, compliance, and control across the entire SaaS lifecycle.
Read the full article here.
