According to a recent survey by Rainstor, 85% of companies embracing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications want to keep a copy of their data outside of their SaaS vendor's offering.

Although Rainstor is a commercial provider of data repository services, their findings do raise an interesting contractual question: In the event of a dispute with a cloud service provider, how do I get my data back in its entirety?

This issue needs to be included in any commercial agreement relating to cloud services, perhapsusing 3rd party 'data escrow' services.