Skip to main content

Legal issues in Commercial and Business Considerations

Any organisation dealing with sensitive/personal information must regulate this information carefully to avoid legal disputes in case of any discrepancies. Legal contracts must be drawn to ensure that the liability of data is shifted to the side of the user and the organisation is insulated from any issues pertaining to content such as copyright infringement, illegal data, and classified information.
Businesses need to have expectations right when it comes to legal issues related to the cloud. What kind of information does the user/employees of a company store in the cloud are to be strictly monitored and regulated. If the company does not have such resources to mediate, then it should have Terms and Agreements duly signed by the user - so that the liability of content/data stored on the cloud is on the user. This way, the business can avoid legal issues. Content issues that may arise includes Copyright infringement, illegal data, classified information etc.
One classic example could be WikiLeaks. It is a website primarily dedicated to provide secret and classified information from corporations and governments. It is currently hosted in servers located in Sweden's former nuclear bunkers, the location for which is unknown. The data is also spread across distributed servers in the world. This way, the cloud service provider has ensured that the data is safe and secure and untraceable. The reason why it is kept like it is because, the cloud service provider that hosts WikiLeaks may get into too much legal trouble because of the content that is being published on the site. Most content are classified by Government across the globe or sensitive information related to major corporations or military secrets. What protects the hosting service provider is the legal agreement and contracts. This way, the legal battle is only on Julian Assange who is the founder of WikiLeaks and not on the cloud service provider.

Compliance Issues

Data compliance is critical in the cloud and is in fact a major area of concern for organisations moving to the cloud. Compliance in the cloud can be categorised into two types
i. Geographic compliance
ii. Industry compliance

i. Geographic compliance:

 With the flow of personal data across borders, geographic locations play a vital role in the storage and processing of data. For instance, what may seem right in the US may be a breach in Canada or Europe. Also different regions within the same country may follow a different set of compliance measures.

ii. Industry compliance: 

Some industries like healthcare and finance pose very stringent compliance measures while working in the cloud. These compliance measures are practiced to make the regulation of sensitive data more centralized.
To avoid any legal issues that might arise from compliance matters, organisations must,
  • Analyse the data to be moved to the cloud. Data that is prone to maximum risk must be kept internal or in the private cloud.
  • Draw a compliance checklist and ensure the cloud provider has the capabilities to protect data with the right compliance framework.
  • Conduct an audit to ensure that compliance measures offered by the provider have been implemented in real.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Special Permissions in linux

The setuid permission on an executable file means that the command will run as the user owning the file, not as the user that ran the command. One example is the passwd command: [student@desktopX ~]$ ls -l /usr/bin/passwd -rw s r-xr-x. 1 root root 35504 Jul 16 2010 /usr/bin/passwd In a long listing, you can spot the setuid permissions by a lowercase s where you would normally expect the x (owner execute permissions) to be. If the owner does not have execute permissions, this will be replaced by an uppercase S . The special permission setgid on a directory means that files created in the directory will inherit their group ownership from the directory, rather than inheriting it from the creating user. This is commonly used on group collaborative directories to automatically change a file from the default private group to the shared group, or if files in a directory should be

The Seven-Step Model of Migration

Irrespective of the migration approach adopted, the Seven-step Model of Cloud Migration creates a more rational point of view towards the migration process and offers the ability to imbibe several best practices throughout the journey Step 1: Assess Cloud migration assessments are conducted to understand the complexities in the migration process at the code, design and architectural levels. The investment and the recurring costs are also evaluated along with gauging the tools, test cases, functionalities and other features related to the configuration. Step 2: Isolate The applications to be migrated to the cloud from the internal data center are freed of dependencies pertaining to the environment and the existing system. This step cuts a clearer picture about the complexity of the migration process. Step 3: Map Most organisations hold a detailed mapping of their environment with all the systems and applications. This information can be used to distinguish between the

RequestsDependencyWarning: urllib3 (1.24.1) or chardet (3.0.4) doesn't match a supported version

import tweepy /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/requests/__init__.py:80: RequestsDependencyWarning: urllib3 (1.24.1) or chardet (3.0.4) doesn't match a supported version!   RequestsDependencyWarning) Traceback (most recent call last):   File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>   File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/tweepy/__init__.py", line 14, in <module>     from tweepy.api import API   File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/tweepy/api.py", line 12, in <module>     from tweepy.binder import bind_api   File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/tweepy/binder.py", line 11, in <module>     import requests   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/requests/__init__.py", line 97, in <module>     from . import utils   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/requests/utils.py", line 26, in <module>     from ._internal_utils import to_native_string   File "/usr/lib/python2.

tag