Having a thorough cloud vendor qualification process and intelligent SLAs in your contracts helps in maximizing the value of the cloud while maintaining regulatory compliance. Besides, we have listed some best practices for compliance in the cloud.
- Cloud vendor qualification tools
When qualifying the cloud vendors there are many tolls where you can use audits, questionnaires, investigating on the information available to the public, and checking references. As audits are time-consuming and expensive, you might want to preserve them for the critical systems. For less critical systems reviewing a completed questionnaires is enough. In order to save the resources, you want to use a risk based approach when it comes to choosing qualification tools. Consider the defining system in your SOPs, and then build a matrix that is in alignment with the types of qualification tools with each level of criticality. As a clarifying point, the subjects covered will be the same across all the cloud vendors and systems.
- Additional SOPs
Your cloud vendor qualification SOP is super helpful for you in choosing an appropriate system for the regulated purposes, however, it is not the sole SOP you require for a service in the cloud. As with any kind of regulated software or hardware, you will require documented procedures nonetheless that tend to address the business use and quality assurance or QA, particularly the computer validation system or the CSV and the change control. As a general guide, your cloud vendor will be the owner of the technical processes which you will qualify while the cloud vendor selection is ongoing and enforce the very same in your SLAs, and then you will be the owner of the application procedures, along with the quality assurance processes overlapping.
- Beware of the challenges the cloud may add to your IT workload
When it comes to evaluating cloud vendors, begin by looking investing the data location. To comply, the cloud vendor should always keep your European customer data on servers which are located in Europe. Multi-tenancy and de-provisioning also tend to pose challenges. Public cloud providers use the former to optimize the server workload to keep the costs down. It also means that you are sharing server space with other businesses, so you should always be aware of what safeguards your cloud providers to keep the comprises at bay. On the basis of the critical nature of your data, you may also want to use encryption.
Comments are closed.