The panel then suggested customers may want to run applications redundantly in two clouds instead of one. This may increase cost but it will still be less expensive than building, owning, operating and maintaining an exclusive infrastructure, they concluded.

“The cost is never equal to internal” IT infrastructures, Crosby said. “You may experience three days of outage but you wouldn’t have existed otherwise.” 

Berlind then asked the panel if cloud providers needed to be more transparent in their infrastructure operations and service-level guarantees, and whether those SLAs needed to be more comprehensive and standards improved. The panel concluded that it’s up to the customer and provider to negotiate a contract beforehand that is detailed and airtight.

“They’ve got to develop that relationship, which includes transparency,” Schroepfer said. “Customers have to trust the provider; they’ve got to believe they are fixing (any glitch).”

“The contract defines that relationship,” Rowland concurred.