A voice came from on high and said unto me, "Go forth and harvest the clouds." Well, not a voce in excelsis exactly, but a court order directing I gather up parties' webmail.
The task seemed simple enough: The litigants would surrender their login credentials, and I'd collect and process their messages for relevance while segregating for privilege review.
Their data lived "in the cloud," and considering its celestial situation, I might have taken a cue from Ecclesiastes 11:4: "Whoever looks at the clouds shall not reap." So it was, I nearly got smote — not by Yahweh but by Yahoo! Cloud computing refers to web-based tools and resources that supplant local applications and storage. It's called "the cloud" because of the cloud-shaped icon used to signify the internet in network schematics.
Cloud computing lets companies avoid capital expenditure for hardware and software. Instead, they scale up or down by renting "virtual machines" as needed, connecting to them via the internet. Cloud computing also encompasses Software as a Service (SaaS), where users "lease" programs via the internet — think Google Apps or Salesforce. com — along with the much-touted Web 2.0 — a catchall for internet-enabled phenomena such as social networking, blogs, wikis, Twitter, YouTube, and arguably any web venture that survived the dot-com apocalypse.
Such cloud-based services aren't new — my email's been in the cloud for five years, and twice that for my calendar. But cloud computing is big news in today's economy as companies great and small seek savings by migrating data services to the ether. For the rest of us, accessing and searching our e-mail from anywhere, coupled with near-limitless free storage, makes webmail irresistible.
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Source: lawtechnews.com
By: Craig Ball
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