One topic that kept popping up at the recent IBX Purchasing Executive Summit was the transition of goods to services and the implications this has on purchasing. Take cloud computing for instance; it’s the IT hype bar none of 2009, yet few purchasing functions have experience in sourcing the service let alone managing contracts.
Given the circumstances, the benefits of cloud computing are quite obvious:
- Financial savings – CAPEX is reduced to a minimum
- Pay for actual usage – no need to own excess capacity to deal with peaks
- Shared cost – overhead is shared among all cloud customers
If the evangelists have their way, it’s a no brainer. A recent Gartner report stated that in 2011 early technology adopters will forgo capital expenditures and instead purchase 40 percent of their IT infrastructure as a service. Other industry analysts have compared the advent of cloud computing to the establishment of utility providers.
In the early stages of industrialism, any one investing in a factory by default had to invest in their own power plants. A few years later a utility sales man – figuratively speaking – showed up with a power cord and rendered the factory owned power plant useless.
So what is cloud computing: frankly put, it’s outsourcing with a twist: not only has your staff (and their computers) left the building, so has your data.
This of course has severe legal implications, the roots of which need to be understood and scrutinized during the sourcing process. In particular sourcing professionals need to ensure that contracts cover the following key issues:
- Data security and data regulation – not only need cloud computing supplier adhere to customer policies but they also need to be able to uphold legal obligations relating to where the customer is based.
- Performance issues – SLA:s are essential and these need to include all aspects of business continuity.
- Contract closure and exit – what happens to your data once the contract is annulled and how will the cloud computing supplier deliver the data?
- Supplier risk – supplier stability is essential; if possible perform a due diligence before entering into the contract to uncover unwanted scenarios.
