In this era of many enterprises moving content to the cloud, it is easy to get caught up in the potential benefits and rush to get started without properly protecting yourself. Don't forget to construct solid Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with your SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) vendors before signing a contract for their services.

Here's 5 things that you should be considering:

1. What recourse do you have if your private or confidential content is leaked?
2. Is it explicitly stated who can see your content? Obviously you don't want the public or your competitors to get access, but is it OK if employees from your Cloud vendor can get access to all your information?
3. How will your pricing change if you need to scale your services up? And down?
4. What should you expect from your Cloud vendor if you want to move your content somewhere else?
5. What happens if the vendor goes out of business? Is there is adequate and acceptable provisions for migrating your information either back to you, or to another Cloud environment?

We continue to evaluate several SaaS options for Web Content Management, Document Management, Digital Asset Management, and Enterprise Collaboration in our research reports.

We're all learning more and more about the benefits and pitfalls of a Cloud model – unfortunately many of these negative lessons are coming at the expense of real companies. If you are considering playing in the cloud, make sure you have a proper parachute.