Legal Commentary

With the explosion of interest in cloud computing, aka software as a service (née application service providers), it's no surprise that issues are arising about the e-discovery ramifications when your data is floating up in the ether of the web.

Internet.com's CIO Update offers an interesting article, from EMC's James Shook (director of e-discovery and compliance) and marketer David Morris. They tackle several topics, including legal holds (don't expect you can dodge them just because your files aren't physically in your shop), and the "enormously complex" issue of international privacy laws.

The authors concede that conducting EDD on data within the cloud "will have its challenges. Identification and collection of large volumes of data can have intensive bandwidth, CPU, and storage requirements -- and that's assuming there are self-help tools in place to locate the data on your own." Then there's the issue of screwups by your provider, such as accidental deletions -- and who picks up the tab for fines and sanctions.