Data Flow Management and Compliance in Cloud Computing

As cloud computing becomes an increasingly dominant means of providing computing resources, the legal and regulatory issues associated with data in the cloud become more pronounced. These issues derive primarily from four areas: contract, data protection, law enforcement, and regulatory and common law protections for particularly sensitive domains such as health, finance, fiduciary relations, and intellectual property assets. From a technical perspective, these legal requirements all impose information management obligations on data sharing and transmission within cloud-hosted applications and services. They might restrict how, when, where, and by whom data may flow and be accessed. These issues must be managed not only between applications, but also through the entire, potentially global, cloud supply chain.