Should your company be taking greater advantage of the benefits of cloud computing? The promise sounds enticing: instantaneous access to seemingly infinite data storage and computing power—as, when, and where needed, without all the cost associated with investment in hardware and personnel required to maintain peak-time computing requirements. As Charles Babcock, editor-at-large of InformationWeek, argues in The Cloud Revolution: How Cloud Computing is Transforming Business and Why You Can’t Afford to be Left Behind (2010), the cloud represents nothing less than “a shift in how end users will do the bulk of their computing.”
As companies contemplate moving their existing data, software, and/or infrastructure applications to a cloud service, whether public, private, or a hybrid between the two, potential traps lurk for the unwary. Many such challenges have been widely reported and discussed, such as issues relating to securing a company’s sensitive customer data in the cloud. See “Cloud Computing Down to Earth: A Primer for Corporate Counsel,” CorpCounsel, February 28, 2011.
