The draft version of a proposed New Zealand code of practice for cloud computing has been issued for comment. The New Zealand Computer Society has been coordinating development of the code, known as the Cloud Code, since September last year.

The approach and structure of the code were shaped by a series of public meetings and the content by a set of expert panels. New points brought up at the public meetings, such as the need to specify ownership of the user's data during and after the period of service provision and the locations where data is kept, have been included in the current draft of the code.

There is still debate over how to represent a number of services from the same provider, some of which may be compliant with the code and some not; whether such a provider should be allowed to advertise themselves as "compliant with respect to such-and-such a service", or whether compliance should be an attribute of the service, not the provider.

The definition of cloud computing has been reduced for simplicity to five principles

The often cited (and sometimes disputed) requirement that a cloud service be "multi-tenanted" does not figure in the simplified definition.