Patrick Thibodeau, blogger and contributor for Computerworld, reports in an article dated September 23, 2010 that top lawyers from cloud vendors Microsoft, Google, Amazon.com, and many others, testified before Congress on the need to update the legal protections afforded to cloud-based computing systems. According to the lawyers, "The lack of such protections today is a particularly important issue for enterprise customers, and is deterring some from using cloud services."
Google Senior Counsel Richard Salgado tried to give Congress an idea of the breadth of cloud-based network systems by telling the Senate Judiciary Committee that "there are 3 million business users of the company's cloud services today, and about 3,000 more sign up for them each day." He went on to say that all of those clients "'face inconsistent, confusing and uncertain' privacy laws that can be applied to [their] data."
Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith told the Committee that the "24-year-old Electronic Communications Privacy Act should be overhauled." Smith's testimony before the Committee is available here. Smith testified that "It would come as a surprise [to Microsoft's clients] that the level of privacy . . . differs depending on where the document happens to be stored. Their reasonable expectation of privacy does not hinge on these [legal] distinctions (emphasis added)."
The entire article can be found at the link above, or here.
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