Like businesses across all sectors of the economy, cloud service providers are far from immune to the worst ravages of the recession.

But when a provider does go bust what happens to the businesses that have put their faith, money and resources in finding a suitable partner and are now threatened with losing services, resources and data as a result of their collapse?

For many organisations, the main challenge is: when their data is held in the cloud; how do they retain control and ownership of it when their service provider goes under – and how easy is it to transfer that data to another service provider? Just as importantly: what mechanisms does the existing provider have in place to protect them if the worst does happen?

Typically, when organisations acquire on-premise software, it is written into their contract that they get control of the code in the event that the …