The Cloud's Legal Lining

As cloud computing grows ever more pervasive, pricing will moderate and legal and regulatory challenges will emerge, a top technology attorney says.

Everyone, it seems, is weighing in with opinions on how the evolution, or revolution, of cloud computing will play out, and attorneys are no exception.

Reed Smith, one of the nation's largest law firms with more than 1,600 attorneys, is planning a series of white papers exploring legal and regulatory aspects of what will no doubt be a continuing explosion of cloud-based technology infrastructure capabilities. So far companies have barely scratched the surface of the opportunities that will come to handle computing workloads and host and develop applications more efficiently off-premises. With those benefits may come a number of legal and regulatory considerations, suggests Joseph Rosenbaum, a partner at Reed Smith and chairman of the firm's Advertising Technology & Media Law practice.

Rosenbaum recently shared some of his views on cloud computing with CFO. An edited version of the interview follows.

Is data security the most important thing about the cloud, from a legal standpoint?
Everybody is talking about privacy and data protection, but I'm not sure the issues are all that different from those that apply to any outsourcing or hosting arrangement. And that's not new. Going back to the late 1960s, there were time-sharing arrangements where companies would trust their IT operations in whole or in part to third-party providers.

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Source: cfo.com
By: David McCann