5 legal gotchas in the cloud
Don't sign that contract until you consider five red flags in cloud service deals.
Last year, a global food manufacturing and distribution company set out to move its HR talent management processes to a software-as-a-service provider. But as attorneys for the food company reviewed the proposed contract, they found some potentially serious legal land mines.
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For starters, the SaaS provider had operations in the U.S., Europe and Canada. "Europe and Canada are two jurisdictions that heavily regulate [the use of] personal information. Since this was an HR system, there would be a lot of personal information," recalls Rebecca Eisner, an attorney specializing in outsourcing who represented the food company.
The provider also wanted the flexibility to move the company's information to data centers anywhere in the world, and that would subject the company to the laws of whatever country the data passed through or landed in.
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