After attending last week’s All About the Cloud, Satish Shenoy shared a summary about the Customer Satisfaction: Trust and Transparency in the Cloud presentation.
Moderator: Ken Wasch
Participants: Dennis Dayman, Roman Pavlyuk, Frits Veltink, Patrick (for Mark Symonds)
Key Topics Covered: The meaning of trust (in the cloud context), Trust issues and how they are dealt with globally (European community), Certification and Trust, Trust as an issue among customers, Limitations with small cloud service providers.
Discussion Points:
• What does Trust mean?
• The question is how trust evolved over time? Think of how we used to use the credit card over the internet
• Roman – Agreed. The way this works is there are some key early adopters that move forward and initially build trust and then we have a critical mass of users and then followers
Ken: What is happening of trust issues among Euro Cloud community?
- Some key standards have been established and there is a certification program, etc
Ken: Fritz, Who is running the certification program?
- There is a certification authority who certifies
Ken: Patrick, What is going on with SaaS-70?
-New version of cloud trust certification mechanism – It is SSAE-16 – specifically run by AICPA (American Institute of Certified Public Accountants)
Ken: Let’s talk about certification and trust….
-Fritz – If you look at trust issues – there are 3 issues -
• Are you reliable?
• Are you secure? – Some people are starting to believe that SaaS solutions are more secure than internal platforms
• What are you (as a provider) doing with my data?
Also, it is critical to benchmark yourself and continuously improve.
Ken: Benchmarks are measuring what?
Benchmarks to measure Key performance indicators (KPIs)
Ken to Audience: – Is trust an issue among your customers? Can you share an anecdotal example?
Medical customer – Hospital would not go forward with cloud based technology – Company wanted to take on unlimited liability for this hospital to agree to go to a cloud based infrastructure
Roman – A good DR plan is critical to build trust
Fritz – Good governance structure is critical – this is how we handle ticketing, DR, what we do if there is an incidence – CRITICAL to gain customer trust; If you are able to proactively find an issue and call them before they call you, then you strengthen customer trust in you.
(Roman to Audience) – Any good examples of customers dealing with very sensitive customer data
Audience – One important trust issue is the ability of us as a small cloud provider has the ability to last
for many years as a provider.
(Ken to Panel) : Can small cloud service providers be trusted to last ?
Roman – The key is to provide standards based cloud services so the customer is more comfortable with having the option to swap one service provider with another relatively easily
Patrick- We have seen emergence of “escrow” (insurance) of cloud services – Hold money in escrow to be able to run operations for a certain amount of time in case the provider fails – Not cheap but it is an option to customers but it ends up being such an expensive thing when even large customers look at this as an option
(Patrick in discussion with audience)
The escrow option in some ways is a little ridiculous since it is probably an option that cannot be practical to be executed in case there was ever a need to activate the option.
Ken: We have been successful so far in avoiding over-regulation of cloud industry. Where there is uncertainty, you may be inviting regulation. I see the world as divided into 5 regions -The US, Japan, China, and rest of world… If we end up with a regulatory structure that has 5 different requirements, we are going to diminish value of cloud computing which is “boundary” ignorant
Patrick – It is about intention
Fritz – It is an emotional thing
FINAL Summary Comments:
-Patrick – Data does not know countries or national boundaries; as service providers we need to communicate and inform our customers proactively
-Roman – It is about Reliability, Privacy and Security and if you do well in the 3 areas – you build trust. While reliability and privacy are more of a provider –side responsibility, security is more a collaborative issue between both end user and service provider.
-Fritz – To gain trust, you need to be trustworthy – Have a governance model; drive continuous improvement; Inform, communicate with your customers, benchmark yourself and continuously improve.
Heard at the Session:
• “Trust is an emotional issue and not an infrastructure issue….” Patrick
• ” It is really about intention and making that known…”Fritz