Businesses of all sizes are adopting multiple and increasingly comprehensive cloud solutions. The cloud offers a more rapid pace of innovation; outsourced infrastructure management; real-time flexibility and scalability; sophisticated, highly compatible tools and applications; and enhanced mobility, collaboration, and rights management. Costs are relatively low and getting even lower, as the capacity of the major clouds increases and the competition intensifies.\r
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Even while the IT departments of oil and gas companies are busily learning the unique skill sets involved in virtual IT, it is important to remember that the negotiation of cloud contracts also presents unique and critically important challenges. Major cloud providers have platforms and processes that cannot be easily customized. Although IT outsourcing through the cloud is attractive (and inevitable), the existence of limited or non-existent audit rights, variable service details and specifications, and minimal assumption of risk by an IT service provider is not. The company must guard and ensure access to its systems and proprietary data, safeguard personal information, and comply with various laws and regulations.\r
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Complicating matters, oil and gas companies typically work in multiple jurisdictions, with a full slate of business partners and service providers that count on the availability and use of the companies' data. Some data may be particularly confidential or protected under national laws. The handling and international transfers of personal data associated with hundreds or thousands of employees warrant careful attention and tailored contractual provisions, including HIPAA compliance for benefit plan data in the US. Companies with retail operations are likely to maintain substantial volumes of payment cardholder and other consumer data, and the underlying privacy and data security concerns must be appropriately understood and addressed.\r
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Taking all this into account, we hope you will join us to explore important issues for enterprise adoption of the cloud within the oil and gas industry, and various approaches to addressing those issues.
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