Cloud computing brings forward computing power and storage as a utility without having to pay for the huge upfront costs of owning racks of servers and hard drives. As companies are flocking to migrate their information and systems to cloud computing because of the reduced cost and increased reliability, privacy is an issue that emerges (Takabi, Joshi, & Ahn, 2010). The question of what information to put in the cloud and what is accessible to the internet becomes an issue that keeps managers and lawyers awake at night. Privacy concern and who is ultimately responsible for the information to ensure that the data remains private and does not violate laws is an issue between the cloud computing providers, the companies that want to move their aging infrastructure to cloud computing and regulatory bodies. …show more content…
As data is shared and stored in many different regions all over the world, old privacy laws seem to be insufficient for providing companies or its users the privacy that they want. With the involvement of third parties and multiple location hosted data, this leads to many legal issues. As the service provider is different than the utility or cloud provider can be different, you have three parties that have information that needs to remain private and protected.
There are laws like the USA PATRIOT Act, HIPAA, FRCA, and a slew of other federal laws that restrict data movement but ultimately fail to protect information to be disclosed to private parties. (Zhou, Zhang, Xie, Qian, & Zhou, 2010). With changing landscape of regulation and additions every year, cloud hosting services and the users ultimately have to be aware of where their information is stored in order to safeguard themselves, their data, and their user’s