Tech & Sourcing @ Morgan Lewis

As discussed in a post from last month, annual spending worldwide on cloud services continues to rise with an expected increase up to $332 billion by the end of 2021, which is an increase from $270 billion in 2020. While the private sector is marching forward with increased reliance on hosted services, US government organizations have followed suit by increasing spending in cloud-based solutions allowing them to capitalize on the cost-savings and innovation gained by SaaS offerings.

Annual spending worldwide on cloud services is expected to increase by 23% in 2021, according to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, which cites a forecast by IT research and consulting firm Gartner Inc. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses have shifted to cloud-based services to support remote work, but businesses are also using the shift in attitudes toward cloud services to move more complex IT needs to the cloud. The article reasons that the push to use cloud services may also be due to the hybrid workplace model that many businesses are adopting, where workers can work both in the office and from home. This model requires that remote workers have access to critical software and infrastructure.

Customers engaging a software as a service (SaaS) vendor often end up using the vendor’s form agreement, which can range from being extremely vendor friendly to middle of the road. Regardless of where it falls on the spectrum, a SaaS vendor’s agreement will most likely contain one or more provisions giving the vendor rights to suspend the services being provided under the agreement. Some common suspension rights we have seen in vendor agreements include suspension rights relating to nonpayment, disruptive use of the services, and violation of law through use of the services.

Peter Watt-Morse and Ben Klaber, members of our technology, outsourcing, and commercial transactions practice, will be presenting a one-hour session on cloud computing as part of the Pennsylvania Bar Institute’s (PBI’s) virtual Cyberlaw Update 2020. The session will take place Tuesday, September 29, 2020 at 10:10 am ET.

In April, we shared a LawFlash Outsourcing and Managed Services Agreements During COVID-19: Our Perspective. With the continued and unprecedented impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic on business operations, we thought it would be timely to provide a brief update on five top-of-mind issues that we are addressing with outsourcing and managed services clients.

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.

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.

Open Banking is an initiative mandated by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in 2017. It is intended to facilitate better competition in the banking sector by mandating protocols that facilitate the secure sharing of customer-related data of the nine largest banks in the United Kingdom (CMA9) with third-party providers (TPPs).