Cloud adviser: Where’s your data?

With cloud computing, technology has advanced more quickly than the law's ability to effectively address its implications.

Consider the U.S. Patriot Act. It was recently revealed that U.S.-based cloud providers may have to comply with Patriot Act requests for data that's located in a provider's European data centers, even though this conflicts with the European Union's 1995 Data Protection Directive.

In response to that conflict, the European Commission recently announced that it plans to propose reforms to the EU directive by the end of January 2012.

Of course, cloud computing was not even a buzzword when the directive was first formulated in 1995. But all of this serves as a good reminder to ensure that your cloud-computing contract effectively addresses issues associated with data location and legal requests for data access. Read more...