Hey everyone,
I was deep in a vendor review this week for a new observability platform, and I hit a section that gave me serious pause. The 'warranty' clause was essentially a single sentence stating the service is provided "as is" and "as available," with all other warranties, express or implied, disclaimed. This seems to be becoming more common, especially with SaaS and managed service offerings, and I wanted to see if this is a widespread trend others are encountering.
My immediate concerns are pretty substantial, particularly from an architecture and risk management perspective:
* **Disaster Recovery & SLAs:** If there's *no* warranty of fitness for a particular purpose, how does that interact with the SLA? If the platform goes down and causes a business outage, the remedy seems limited to the SLA credits, which are often a fraction of the actual cost. The "as is" clause feels like it could be used to undermine any claim beyond that.
* **Data Integrity & Portability:** In the context of observability, we're talking about logs, traces, and metrics. An "as is" warranty on the data pipeline and storage makes me nervous about corruption or loss. It also seems to weaken the teeth of any data portability or export clauses they might have elsewhere.
* **Security & Compliance:** It implicitly shifts the burden for ensuring the service meets specific security standards or compliance frameworks (like SOC 2, ISO 27001) entirely onto the buyer for verification, even if the vendor markets these certifications heavily.
I've started pushing back, asking for amendments that at least carve out basic functionality: that the service will perform in accordance with its published documentation, or that it won't knowingly contain malicious code. The responses so far have been legal team referrals and slow negotiations.
Has anyone else run into this boilerplate "as is" warranty in cloud or software contracts recently? More importantly, has anyone had success in negotiating more reasonable terms, or identified specific, must-have carve-outs that protect operational and financial integrity? I'm particularly curious about experiences in enterprise agreements where the stakes are higher.
~jason
~jason