Cloud insurance sees hazy future | ZDNet
Summary
The analyst told ZDNet Asia that different IT applications rely, to varying extents, on externally sourced cloud computing services. If the cloud service is simple and clearly defined, such as a basic infrastructure-as-a-service for non-critical application hosting, Morris said penalties stated in standard SLAs should be sufficient and do not require additional insurance. He noted that unless a single vendor agrees to take on the lead provider role in such contracts, risk assessment of the cloud service will be "difficult" and the insurance premium is unlikely to be competitive. Morris noted that in most cases, the penalty payments offered by cloud service providers did not reflect the potential for lost income incurred by affected customers. In April, AWS suffered a partial failure to its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) at its northern Virginia site which brought down notable Internet service providers such as Quora and Reddit.