The cloud: Storms on the horizon

At its heart, the cloud is really just shorthand for shared resources. The cloud is regularly touted as the answer to all of your IT woes. But, beyond the marketing pitches and the oft-discussed technological concerns, there is a storm brewing.

There are very real legal concerns lurking inside this brave new world of resource sharing. Sadly, it’s not just the global cloud that suffers from these concerns – even your own virtualized server is at risk.

Governments have been increasingly upping their rhetoric on cloud-based data, pushing for greater access than ever before. Do you own your data? Who else has access to your data? What happens when your co-mingled data ends up under a government investigation? And, beyond the global cloud, what is the real-world impact of a third-party subpoena showing up on your doorstep when you’ve virtualized your websites on a single physical server?

This video from Shmoocon 2013 discusses current law and technology.

Tyler Pitchford is the co-founder of the Azureus BitTorrent client. Currently, he works as an appellate attorney, but has previously worked for the Florida State Attorney’s office, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, and the Florida Supreme Court.