Tech & Sourcing @ Morgan Lewis

New York’s Department of Financial Services (DFS) issued guidance on April 13 alerting regulated entities of the significant increase in cybercrime during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

There comes a time when every contract will come to an end; however, what happens when the parties don’t want that to happen but there are no provisions in the contract dealing with extension rights? In this blog we analyze good practices in relation to extending contracts where there is no express right of extension.

Often included in long-term outsourcing/managed services agreements but sometimes overlooked as a contractual right, in this post we look at benchmarking provisions, including what benchmarking is, common rights and restrictions, and other considerations for customers and suppliers.

When responding to requests for proposals (RFPs), vendors should be conscious that they might be disclosing highly confidential or commercially sensitive material to the potential customer, with no guarantee of securing the proposed contract. Such information could, without any restrictions, be used by the potential customer to assist the vendor’s competitors or to develop solutions in-house.

Morgan Lewis’s COVID-19 Task Force and Coronavirus COVID-19 resource page have been established to address the variety of legal issues impacting companies at this time.

There are two primary models by which vendors will make software available to customers (1) software as a service (SaaS); and (2) on premise. In a SaaS model, the vendor provides, maintains, and hosts (either itself or through a hosting SaaS vendor) the desired software, and grants the customer access to the software functionality via the internet.

One of the major changes introduced by the Stop Hacks and Improve Electronic Data Security (SHIELD) Act, which was signed into New York law last year, is scheduled to take effect this week.

The Financial Stability Board (FSB) published on December 9, 2019, its report on financial institutions’ increasing reliance on third parties to provide cloud computing services (the Report).

Morgan Lewis recently published an article on the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak and its effect on General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union.

In cloud services, whether it is infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), or software as a service (SaaS), service availability is often a significant customer concern because the customer is relying on the vendor to provide and manage the infrastructure and related components that are necessary to provide the services.