Cloud Computing and Security offered by Cloud Vendors

Though everyone today ready to jump into cloud madness, but there are lot of concerns about type of services cloud vendors are offering,pay-per-use rate,data security,reliability etc , and out of all these concern one of the major concern is about security. While selecting cloud vendor companies closely review their security policies .Companies should make their own check list about data security feature they are looking from cloud vendor, though this list depend on the type of business/industry , but below are few points that I feel are important -

1.What are  the security policies for the data.

2.Where data-centers are located , are they located in safe location in terms of political stability or safety from natural disasters.

3.What are the date recovery/backup policies in case their is crash , and what could be max. downtime (if any)

4.How many people from the vendor will have access to your data , and how reliable those people are.

5.What type of SaaS software vendor is offering and again how safe that is, and what are their commitment to enhance those software.

6.With Major place like Google, workday, Oracle, amazon, Microsoft are jumping into Cloud area how committed is your vendor to remain in the market.

7.Is vendor has any clause in the agreement that allow him to sell your customer's  basic data to 3rd party?

8.Is vendor has some external agency to monitoring the attack from spy ware, hackers etc or they have in house group in place , and how reliable these monitory agencies are.

9.check with your vendor about the pay-per-use rates,memory quote , and things like how much memory powers they are willing to allocate for the processes that take days to complete.Is their any clause in the contract that will allow vendor to kill your process that is running for last x number of hours.

10.who will responsible for the integrity of the data in case your have decided to move out of his cloud to a private cloud or some other vendors cloud.

11.Will your vendor will also delete the data from the data center once user deleted from the SaaS software, companies need to know that.