Cloud computing at its peak is considered the future of computing and business eco system. But there are some important leagality associated with cloud computing, and you must take care of some of important issues before signing up with any of the cloud vendor for your business.
The issues are genrally related to the businesses who want to shift to cloud based models for whole infrastructure but not for the small services like file sharing or saas.
1. The Actual Physical Location of Your data.
As cloud computing hides the infrastructural details of the server you may not know in which country your data is situated. The actual location of data may raise the problem of legally handing over of data of country government.
As a Customer, you must be knowing the Law of proviance. You should also make sure that if any dispute arises, what will be the place of jurisdiction or in simple words in case of dispute, which country law will be used to make settelment.
For example,
Let us say you own a Company in US, and you are running your cloud servers through the cloud vendor of russia, who do host his servers in China. In the case of conflict you should know which will be the location of the legal battel. wheather it is US,China or russia, and also have you enough resources to get conflicts solved in that perticular jurisdiction(in case of different country than you are resident of).
2. Reliability and Safety of data
Your data may be stored ont the vendor's data center at such a place witch is severely affected to the disater. They may be at some seismic zones where earthquack can be problem, or they may situated at some river bank where flood may create problem, they may be at most remote location where it is not easy to send backup team in case of system failure,what if system is attacted by some unknown virus etc. In such cases they must have some alternate mean of serving you data through duplicate content or backup.
3. Client Privacy.
If there is system failure or attack and privacy breach occures than there must be cyber experts to take over the situations. They may have the cyber insurance. In case of hacked server you must know what are the liability of the vendor and you as a client must be clear.
4. Intellectual rights:
You must be sure of your data is protected under the IP(Intellectual property) rights. You should know the applicable IP rights laws of specific country and what steps can you make in case of infringed.
Your analytical data about your organisations and also your competitor must be kept secret. Such the privileged info must be protected encrypted. They must provide you law enforcement against 3rd party in case of the leak of your business secret.
Your data must not be handed over to 3rd party or analytical companies like advertisers or marketing units or survaying companies in any case. Vendor must provide some standard mean of contract.
