In an effort to improve the IT maintenance and support customers receive from their vendors, Gartner recently published a list of six rights of IT consumers.

The Gartner Global IT Countil for IT Maintenance, which is comprised of the firm’s analysts, in addition to CIOs and senior IT leaders from large corporations, created the list to address issues such as cost and difficulties in maintaining IT systems for enterprises.

The council’s "code of conduct" declares IT customers have the right to predicatble updates for software products, clearly defined response times for IT support levels, reasonable percentage rates for yearly maintenance fee increases, the right to end or change support for products no longer in use, predictable levels of support throughout contract life cycles, clearly defined maintenance for legacy systems and the right to explicit statement of support details.

Experts recently outlined the IT trends that have generated the need for the code of conduct. David Cappuccio, vice president and chief of research at Gartner, said "enterprises need timely, reliable, cost-effective IT maintenance, but they just aren’t getting it."

"This fundamental conflict presents many problems for IT consumers," he added.

Gartner’s code of conduct for IT maintenance and support was released one week after its list of seven rights and responsibilities of cloud technology customers, revealing the need for new regulations as IT trends continue to change.