The Paradigm of Cloud Computing From The Lens of Technolegal Challenges

Cloud services are the best method to offer a dynamic and self adjustable computing and storage resource service to a wide range of clients – from residential users through small businesses to large multi-national organizations. A cloud is a pool of virtualized computer resources and can host a variety of different workloads, including batch-style backend jobs and interactive, nay user-facing applications. It supports redundant, self- recovering, highly scalable programming models that allow workloads to recover from many unavoidable hardware/software failures. However a word of caution is needed here – the cloud ecosystem must be designed to be secure, trustworthy and dependable. Cloud security faces different challenges and issues at various levels in the form of vulnerabilities and attacks – multitenancy, cloud secure federation, vendor lock in , loss of control, confidentiality, data integrity and privacy, data intrusion, virtualization vulnerabilities, cloning and resource pooling, UM hopping, XML signature attack, XSS attack, SQL injection attack and flooding attack, to name a few. Moreover, international law is not agile enough to compete with cloud computing developments. The onus therefore is on international cloud service providers to be familiar with data protection laws and policies of each country that they have a presence in – regardless of their essential understanding about the technology that they are providing via their platforms. In addition, the policies regarding data transfer between countries need to be seriously accounted for in their business plans. Issues surrounding development of standards and best practices in the areas of interoperability, escrow and privacy need to be addressed along with questions as to whether adequate due diligence has been carried out along the chain of responsibility. Otherwise cloud service providers will be exposed to an avalanche of claims including those pertaining to liability for data mining and liability under securities laws for improper dissemination of investment information on social networking websites. The currently pending cases including class action litigations pertaining to Netflix Inc, Facebook “Beacon” Google “Buzz” should be eye openers in this regard. Mention also needs to be made here of the emergence of a parallel form of business called cloud brokering whose objective is to guide the potential enterprise in the choice of a cloud service provider, untwining the tangle of differential features.In a de jure condendo perspective, a uniform legislative approach would be advisable. Internet services operate in a global market. Hence a unified approach – possibly one based on a WIPO treaty – would provide benefits to cloud customers by establishing uniform terms and conditions which drive consistency in the protection of data in the cloud. Opinions are galore that a “cyber seas” agreement may be the ideal vehicle for this kind of system because it provides a balance between a state’s ability to regulate the cloud and an over seeing international authority. Taking the prudent steps now to harness the cloud may in the near future allow the world to reflect on an entirely man-made global public utility and the beginnings of a truly cooperative world market. Needless to say, ultimately it is the users who will choose the model that makes the most sense given their needs – which may end up being a hybrid of cloud computing and the traditional model.