The Cloud and the Contract: Navigating the New World of Software as a Service

Abstract

Like many libraries, the Cornell University Library has been looking at Alma as a next-generation library management system. In the process of this exploration, as well as the pursuit of other cloud-hosted applications and services, we have had to tackle the issue of what needs to go into the contractual agreement with the service provider. Many libraries are used to working with a central IT department to provide some or all of their application hosting. However, how we work with a vendor with an explicit contract can be very different from working with in-house IT. Things that are handled ad-hoc or defined by central policy in an IT shop need to be explicitly negotiated and documented in the contract for Software-as-a-Service. This presentation will discuss the issues of moving from in-house hosting to Software-as-a-Service. We will cover issues such as data ownership, backups and data recovery, and uptime guarantees. The goal will be to give participants a good sense of what questions to ask when evaluating a cloud-hosted product, and how to recognize good answers to those questions.