Code of Practice & The Consumer | Cloud industry forum
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Code of Practice & The Consumer

An Introduction

The Cloud Industry Forum was established to help end users identify critical information that can aid their selection of Cloud Service Providers. The content of this website will be constantly updated to reflect both details of Self Certified Service Providers and additional Guidance on how to interpret and assess information provided.

The Customer Experience

The purpose of the Code of Practice for Cloud Service Providers ("Code") is to bring greater transparency and trust to doing business in the cloud, and it is the customer experience which is ultimately the most important for achieving this.

The customer experience operates on several levels:

Trust

Knowing that an organisation meets the requirements of the Code gives the customer the assurance that it can obtain essential information necessary to make competent business decisions. The Code of Practice Certification Mark by itself conveys this assurance.

CIF Certified The Certified Mark identifies an organisation that has Self Certified to the Cloud Service Provider Code of Practice and is listed on the Cloud Industry Forum's Register of Certified Organisations.

 

Identification of Suppliers

The Code scheme helps customers identify suppliers at three different levels:

  • The fact that an organisation is listed on the CIF register as certified will lead customers to those organisations which have demonstrated this level of responsibility.
  • Organisations which have registered to begin the process of Self-Certification can optionally also have this shown on the CIF register, and customers may select from them as well.
  • There are plans to create a freely available on-line searchable database of services offered by certified organisations.

Guidance

CIF provides additional guidance to end user organisations, freely downloadable from its website, to facilitate their doing business in the cloud. (This guidance is provided on a best-efforts basis, and no liaibility is accepted for how the guidance is used). This guidance includes: