What Cloud Users Need to Know

What Cloud users need to know are legal aspects of the concept, Security and Privacy and Copyright and Licenses. We have answered the most important questions. Cloud computing demands input not only from the IT professionals and users, but also from the lawyers on the planning aspect – is not surprising. But, it is interesting that the legal arguments not primarily serve as limitations of the new business model, but are sometimes even used to support sales to bring solutions with high availability and reliability to the market.

Typically, the cloud computing involved the cloud user (consumer or business), the cloud solution provider and finally the infrastructure operators, of which the cloud solution provider received benefits in the process. Core of the cloud computing service model is the almost complete absence of dedicated own resources and purely based on the actual usage fee (“pay-as-you-go”). Cloud offerings are infrastructure offers (IaaS, use of virtualized hardware resources such as computers, networks, and storage), application packages (SaaS , access to software collections and application programs) and platform offers (PaaS, ideal for programming or a runtime environment that is flexible and dynamically adaptable but now is used nicely for the consumer market).

Continuous effort to distinguish between public, private and hybrid clouds; which leads depending on the configuration, similar to the core legal issues in varying degrees. In addition, resellers like Dropbox, are also providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), which perform multiple roles simultaneously. The boundaries are anything but the user need to consider exactly what kind of provider or operator is to be chosen as a partner or user. Some of the legal issues are already known from the era of outsourcing, imagined possibilities of cloud computing now added a new quality. The most affected areas are the rights in the context of data protection, security of information, legal licensing issues and the contract.

However, concerns often overlap with preliminary issues. A self-assessment of data security and adequate information about licensing before adoption of the cloud service is likely to make the situation flexible for the future.. These findings has nothing to do with the use of cloud, but ideally push the existing business processes to a higher level. This clarification process includes, for example, the classification of data into business secrets, personal data and the most sensitive data within the meaning of the Data Protection Act(s), the analysis of licensing agreements of the cloud applications and paying due diligence to the applicable regulatory requirements ( compliance ).

What Cloud Users Need to Know : Privacy and Cloud Computing

The protection of personal data of the employees and the customers is the center of concerns and therefore also dominated by the discussion of legal aspects of cloud computing. A written agreement for data processing between cloud users and cloud vendors is to agree with the specific technical and organizational measures. The cost of the measures must be proportionate to the protection purpose. And this is an uncertainty for sure. For what security measures are appropriate now is defined by the legislature or court orders in detail. Therefore, according to review and after determining the risk in individual case, measures should be adapted. One of the conditions of permissible data processing is that, the seller can transfer and provide only auxiliary information in relation to the customer to the regulatory bodies.

Encryption techniques are now strong among all the vendors in the market. The lawyers are discussing yet, as the data are legally assessed. The encryption of data is certainly recognized as a measure to circumvent by the means of which you are forced to give access to personal data. Ethically, technically correct point might not be legally correct.

What Cloud Users Need to Know : Copyright and Licenses

In case of copyright and licenses mainly the questions arises : the user, who has moved an application in the cloud is licensed sufficient to operate on the new provider or not. Since there are divergent court decisions on this, one should be sought the ‘cloud of doubt’, the expressed consent of the manufacturer of the software are already present in the initial licensing in the contract agreed. Anyway, there is a need for the disclosure of copies of software to a provider for the approval of the software manufacturer analogous to the situation in hosting.
As far as Free and open-source software is used, most has been previously clarified license and can be shared.

We have discussed these abnormal, less known points many a times within this website. We will suggest the new users or rather the new visitors of this website to search within this website with appropriate keywords or phrases to get possible answers around cloud computing security, privacy and legal issues.