Modelling Contract Management for Cloud Services

Contract Management plays a central role in the management of Cloud Services and requires suitable software solutions to entrust to a third party the provision of applications, infrastructure or services. Contracts for the Cloud must combine international legal, financial, technical and operational aspects in a concise and expressive form, able to drive the business, but also to minimize any controversy in case of problems. Moreover, it must cover a wide range of scenarios: from well-known standard situations (e.g. to provide email, web hosting or housing to private and small companies) to highly customized ones (Government, large companies and strategic customers may have very specific requests which also affect contracts). In all cases software support is essential, during the whole contract lifecycle, from formation to execution, up to the conclusion. In this scenario we propose a process model and an information model as the foundation to build a tool for Cloud Services´ Contract Management (CM). The validation of both models is carried out by means of a focus group of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs).