Cloud Computing Poses E-Discovery, Legal Risks
April 10, 2009By Marty Foltyn
ORLANDO, Fla. — Cloud computing was a hot topic at this week's Storage Networking World show, but one attorney sounded a warning note about the rush to the cloud.
In a presentation titled "Computing (strike that — Litigation) in the Cloud," Steven Teppler, senior counsel at KamberEdelson in New York, said cloud computing and services are a corporate counsel's nightmare.
The 2006 e-discovery amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) changed the legal and corporate information landscape, putting custody and control at top of mind.
"Cloud computing means that data may always be in transit," said Teppler, "never anywhere, always somewhere."
And that creates a big challenge for corporate counsel. How can they identify "who, when and where" in the cloud? How can organizations handle document retention? And to add another layer of worry, information targeted for the cloud may also be subject to laws requiring privacy and persistent data integrity, and other requirements that the storage manager may not even be aware of.
Teppler spelled out the top cloud computing shortcomings: no native security attributes; inadequate or no security provisioning by providers; the lack of understanding of cloud legal issues (a real problem for not only cloud computing providers, but also corporate counsel and IT consultants); and the failure to recognize potential liability from either legal issues or a lack of security.
Teppler told the audience that litigation in the cloud is already here. Users of cloud services will need to insist on service level agreement (SLA) terms with their providers to ensure legal and regulatory compliance, searchability, demonstrable customer care (security), provably persistent data integrity and reliability, and demonstrable storage security and integrity for electronically stored information in the cloud.
Some OpenSocial apps can be written entirely with client-side JavaScript and HTML, leveraging the container to serve the page and store application data. In this case, the app can scale effortlessly because the only request hitting your server is for the gadget specification which is typically cached by the container anyway. However, there are lots of reasons to consider using your own server: * Allows you to write code in the programing language of your choice. * Puts you in control of how much application data you can store. * Lets you combine data from users on multiple social networks. * Enables interaction with the OpenSocial REST API. Setting up an OpenSocial app that uses a third party server is fairly simple. There are a few gotchas and caveats, but the real issues come up when your app becomes successful - serving millions of users and sending thousands of requests per second. Apps can grow especially fast on social networks, so before you launch your next social app, you should think about how to scale up quickly if your app takes off. Unfortunately, scaling is a complex problem that's hard to solve quickly and expensive to implement. Luckily, there are several companies that provide cloud computing resources-places you can store data or run processes on virtual machines. These computing solutions manage huge infrastructures so you can focus on your applications and let the "cloud" handle all the requests and data at scale. This tutorial focuses on a simple photo-sharing app that uses a third-party server to host photos and associated metadata. If this app is going to host millions of images and support many requests per second, we won't be able to run it on a single dedicated host. We'll break the app down and analyze the interactions between the OpenSocial App and the back end server. Then we'll implement the app in the cloud, first using Google App Engine, then leveraging Amazon's S3 data storage service. Finally, we'll look at s
