Cloud Computing and Legal Issues

Cloud Computing and Legal Issues. People has been used with Cloud Computing Security Issues, an article named Cloud Computing and Legal Issues is a bit newer to many of the readers and users. Cloud computing calls not only the IT professionals and users, but also lawyers on the scene and is not very surprising. But it is interesting that legal arguments are no longer primarily the limitations on the new business model, but sometimes even used as sales-supportive, bringing solutions with high availability and reliability to the market.

Introduction to Cloud Computing and Legal Issues

Typically the on cloud computing parties involved are the cloud user (consumer or business), the cloud solution providers and finally the infrastructure operators from which the cloud solution provider receive benefits. Core of the cloud computing business model is that, almost complete absence of its own dedicated resources and purely based on the actual usage based charge. Cloud offerings in infrastructure deals ( IaaS ; which is in turn utilization of virtualized hardware resources such as computers, networks, and storage), application offerings ( SaaS ; access to software collections and application programs) and platform offerings (PaaS ; with PaaS the programming or runtime environments become flexible, dynamically adaptable).

Furthermore, a distinction between public, private and hybrid clouds exist, which depending on configuration, similar to the core legal issues leads to varying degrees. In addition to resellers like Dropbox, there are also providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), which perform multiple roles. The borders are anything but not clear-cut. This is the basic reason behind this article on Cloud Computing and Legal Issues.

Cloud Computing and Legal Issues : Going towards the Deeper aspects

Some of the legal issues are already known from the era of outsourcing, they can be imagined as the possibilities of cloud computing, but now with a new quality. The main affected areas are the rights for data protection, security of information, legal licensing issues and the contract. Users must, however, not play any role in any cloud computing model, the entire spectrum of defined problem areas. Rather, it is sufficient to illustrate the situation of the company carefully beforehand and identified as potentially problematic areas.

Concerns overlap, however, often entrepreneurial preliminary issues such as the ability to be user itself. A self-critical assessment of data security and adequate licensing before the adaption of the cloud is likely to encourage use in many cases, deficits in dealing with corporate data or the internal license managements makes the things light. These findings have nothing to do with the cloud, then use : instead outsourcing tasks the system forces the cloud ideally bring 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 (Acts), the analysis of the contracts with the specific for the cloud applications and due diligence of the applicable regulatory requirements ( compliance ).

This article on Cloud Computing and Legal Issues is an introduction to a series, the users will definitely get more specific model based articles.