Can you comply with court orders for data from the cloud?

The very nature of cloud storage, and one of its selling points, is that the cloud is dynamic. You only use what you need and shut down what you don’t. So if the court orders a forensic recovery of the lost data from the cloud hard drives:

• Do we even know which specific drives were in use by XYZ before the crash at EC2?
• Would Amazon have the ability to remove those drives and replace with others if ordered to do so?
• How many other companies' data have been written on those drives in the interim?
• If the original XYZ data have been overwritten by other companies and the drives are removed for recovery attempts, does the removal mean that the later users have now lost control of their data?
• Do the current users of the removed drives have to be served with a notice that the drives are being forensically reviewed?
• Is there a legal requirement that the current users need to be notified?
• Are the current users due a description of how their data was handled during the recovery and how it was destroyed when the exam was complete in order for them to produce the same to their customers as ordered for compliance with applicable laws?

One last concern facing most companies legally is that of legal hold orders and/or search warrants.

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Source: networkworld.com
By: M. E. Kabay and Gordon Merrill Gordon Merrill