Comments on CIO's Guide to Cloud Computing and On-Demand | Appirio: Cloud Insurance?

Ryan, Thanks for the question. Short and simple,...

2011-03-22T13:31:15.769-07:00

Ryan,

Thanks for the question. Short and simple, our clients insure their data at the point of sale into the cloud. We underwrite the cloud on behalf of insurance companies. Everyone wins. Clients can insure their sensitive data against economic loss or outage and the Insurance companies are able to underwrite a large (cloud) infrastructure at a manageable, digestible level.

Very simply, CloudInsure compartmentalizes the risk away from the systemic risks the clouds face of carrying everyone's liabilities (i.e. sensitive data and resulting costs/penalties associated with losing data) and cloud users are offered an alternative to "TRUST" or hard-to-enforce SLA uptime guarantees. CloudInsure covers the economic loss of reliance on technology against the failure of technology. Meaning, if you only pay, say $10 to use a cloud but have a $1,000 income or economic loss due to a cloud outage or data leak, CloudInsure is an insurance product that is designed to cover the "gray" area between the SLA credit's and the actual loss faced by the consumers. (i.e. state notification fees and requirements, gov't fines/fees/ penalties, HiTech fines, e-commerce loss due to a dark website, ect.)

We were actually just in allthingsD and The WSJ Europe if you'd like to read further:

http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/03/17/are-cloud-companies-in-denial-about-risk/

Feel free to contact us directly at info@cloudinsure or visit our site www.cloudinsure.com

Meghan

That's how I reasoned about it: Who are you? ...

2011-03-16T19:49:21.064-07:00

That's how I reasoned about it:

Who are you? - You're a cloud user.
How do you use the cloud? - You don't mess anymore with infrastructure headache. You run your app and make profit of it.
Why do people pay you? - Because your app is meant to solve their specific problems conserving their privacy.
When the cloud service lose YOUR data is when YOU lose your CLIENTS and THEIR DATA.

Now, what is the cloud insurance?

For sure, in case of a failure many angry clients will try to sue the cloud app owner.
What is the price to be paid?
Any bank has a vault, which is a safe storage for PRIVATE stuff, so it is not known what's inside neither the price of an asset. In cloud case it is the same situation. You can't disclose the private information of your users.
Therefore, you will only lose the clients according to your EULA. Nobody (IMHO) is able to sue your company due to the private nature of the lost data.

Hi Meghan, Simon-- thanks for your comments. Grea...

2011-03-15T11:29:15.951-07:00

Hi Meghan, Simon-- thanks for your comments. Great article, Simon... and very interesting to see this space heat up!

Meghan, very interested to learn more about CloudInsture... we continue to see most of our enterprise clients "self-insure." Can you give an example of how an enterprise has used you to insure against a specific cloud risk?

Ryan

Ryan, Great article. Simon, we offer the very se...

2011-03-14T17:03:54.109-07:00

Ryan,

Great article.

Simon, we offer the very service you mention, glad you asked!

www.cloudinsure.com

In fact, we were just named one of the Top 10 Cloud Start-Ups in Silicon Valley last week -

http://bit.ly/h6UmyP

@CloudInsure

Spot on article, I've just written something s...

2011-03-09T07:16:15.164-08:00

Spot on article, I've just written something similar, just 18 months behind you. And I hadn't considered the parallel with hardware provision.

There's an obvious gap here. It wouldn't take much effort for one of the big cloud providers to work with some insurers such that the insurers felt comfortable underwriting policies based on traditional SLA type metrics. Such policies could then either be sold separately off the shelf by insurers, or bundled into the cost of the cloud service by the providers.

I haven't yet seen anyone offer this service, but there is definitely an opportunity.

Ryan, great article. it is interesting the cloud v...

2011-02-25T07:52:20.106-08:00

Ryan,
great article. it is interesting the cloud vendors are somehow held to higher standard than in-house infrastructure.

This is the most well articulated article I've...

2010-07-28T07:48:41.340-07:00

This is the most well articulated article I've read on this topic. I hope this clears up a lot of FUD on the topic of "Cloud Insurance".

This is a very interesting article. Thanks for exp...

2009-09-21T19:52:47.552-07:00

This is a very interesting article. Thanks for explaining what "cloud insurance" is.