Ratings agencies to emerge for cloud computing?

David Bicknell

3 months ago 0 Comments

The forecasts of ratings agencies have dominated the financial world in recent months. Now a similar idea could be targeted at Cloud computing.

According to a report in the Australian newspaper, the research group Gartner's vice-president Brian Prentice believes there is a need for credible external ratings agencies to develop for cloud service providers.

Prentice suggests current industry performance contracts or service level agreements lack the scope to be able to quantify, or be accountable for, any costly and potentially devastating indirect effects that service failures have on businesses.

Trying to mitigate that risk using service level agreements will ultimately prove unwieldy for companies, which means that a new service model must emerge.

"The issue here is that it's very hard to expect the vendors to have a set of impacts on their business commensurate with the problems that could come up. What that means is that you can't come back on that, and you have to do the assessment on whether the problem is going to show up in the first place," says Prentice.

He believes that ratings agencies that mirror those used in the finance world will emerge for cloud service companies by the end of the year.

Ratings agencies have become the bane of European governments who have found their future prospects and interest rates rising on the basis of agencies' judgements. But the idea of ratings agencies for Cloud service providers? An interesting idea.

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