However, “Australia has a limited population and it’s unlikely that these public cloud offerings will be offered only in Australia,” Vincent said. The efficiencies from regional solutions, such as cheap electricity and cheap labour, would be lost to Australia-only cloud providers.
Personal information can only leave Australia if consent has been given to the transfer; when the transaction benefits the individual and might be impractical to get consent but it was likely that it would be given; or if reasonable steps have been taken to ensure information won’t be used inconsistently with the National Privacy Principles.
A proposed update to the privacy laws in Australia would require that the discloser take reasonable steps to ensure an overseas recipient would not breach the national privacy principals.
Say it with an SLA
More worrying was the discrepancy in terms for SLAs among the 25 contracts. Some providers had redefined downtime to exclude outages of less than 10 minutes.
One provider extended the minimum to 30 minutes.
Rather than take faith in a guaranteed percentage uptime, “customers need to examine track record of service providers”, Vincent said. Damages were typically paid as a credit for the service fees paid or payable. These ranged from generous (100 percent if percentage uptime in a month is less than 95 percent) to the stingy (5 percent per 60 minutes monthly accumulated downtime).
Many of the contracts contained terms which state that data and services will be unavailable during scheduled maintenance, either at particular times or after a notice period provided by the provider. However, some providers had removed the scheduled downtime exception from their SLAs and also removed threshold limits of unscheduled downtime before customers could claim service level credits.
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