Canadian Lawyer InHouse

27 CANADiANLAWyERMAG.CoM/iNhousE april 2014 reduced some others and asked for some additional application-level monitoring," he says. That's why you need the stability of a multi-year relationship, he adds. As needs evolve, so must your contract. The service providers are beginning to re- alize this, says Bik Dutta, director of product and market development in Canada at Cen- turyLink Technology Solutions (formerly Savvis), which recently opened a new 100,000 square feet facility in Markham, Ont. That said, customer expectations are a moving target, particularly when fi rms fi rst make the move from owning their own data centre to a colocation environment, for instance. "There's a propensity for them to ask for as much as possible, as if it's their own data centre," he says. Century is trying harder to anticipate whatever requests come its way. "We've developed our facilities to hit 90 per cent or more of the market requirements at a given time, and features are added to the platform on a regular basis. Nonetheless, it is still meant as a 90 per cent rule." In other words, you can always ask. Guttman says that while the largest fi rms may continue to set up their own data cen- tres, increased regulations in many indus- tries are forcing companies to turn to third parties to assist with compliance chores. "As these things continue to prolifer- ate and get more complicated, and the op- erational requirements of meeting them become onerous, it's a challenge to do it yourself," he says. "The classic raised fl oor off-site allows your provider to meet a num- ber of security and regulatory requirements you wouldn't stand a chance of meeting on your own." As a starting point, Guttman suggests in-house lawyers try and stay away from the actual contracts and the small print until they have enough of a thorough un- derstanding of their organization's comput- ing needs that they can articulate them in a two-page term sheet. "I've been in situations where there were things in (a contract) that couldn't be ex- plained," he says. "We'd ask a question to a service provider, they'd answer it, and we'd say, 'That's contrary to what your contract says,' and they'd have to change it. Jumping into the paper is always a last resort for me." Relying on outside counsel isn't necessar- ily the answer either, Ghan adds. "Don't call a service provider unless you know exactly what it is you're talking about," he says. "I've talked to clients who are quite clueless. They will hire an outside lawyer and these IT lawyers, they may be great at the line and verse of current law, but they don't always know what they're doing. It can make it diffi cult for clients." McCallum believes in the long term, corporate counsel may not fi nd the data centre landscape so diffi cult to navigate. He says it reminds him of the early days of companies looking at solar energy panels in their offi ces. "When that industry came here, the kind of leases the solar developers were asking for were completely foreign to the landlords. There were longer terms, lots of special rights," he says. "I think here it's probably similar. It's not something that people can't get their heads around." And if not, you can always try hiding in the garage. IH Untitled-1 1 14-03-06 1:43 PM

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