are all too common in IT today and Overly says customers should consider how they will deal with them when they occur. Does your service provider have to tell you about it? If your company has customers that are impacted, who informs the public of the breach? Overly says it's a grey area in many cloud contracts. Overly says providers should share information about security breaches and suspected security breaches and the sooner the better after an issue is discovered.

Furthermore, if there is a breach then the provider should leave it to the customers to notify any of its users that may be impacted. "You want to handle that message to your customers," Overly says. Customers may want to know about all security breaches their provider has, not just the ones that you're impacted by. "I may want to know about issues other customers are having," he says. "That's a situation of 'thank God my data wasn't hit, but I still want to know what happened to make sure we're not next in line,'" he says.

Beware of hidden costs

Behind agility, another top reasons many customers embrace cloud computing is because of potential cost savings, yet Overly says customers aren't paying close enough attention to all of the revenue streams vendors may try to sneak into an SLA. In one circumstance, Overly says he found an SLA with a dozen potential revenue streams for the vendor, but only a handful of them were listed in the "Fees" section of the SLA. "Really go through every last line in the contract looking for these things," he says.

For example, a vendor may stipulate that if there is a reported problem that is found to be the user's fault, then the customer can be billed for the time and material used to investigate the issue. "That can add up pretty quickly when there's no limiting factor," Overly says. In another situation, a vendor may provide conservative estimates on how much it will cost to transfer data into or out of the cloud, then when the service is performed it costs much more. Find out how the estimate was made and double check the math, Overly says.