Kushida, Kenji E., Jonathan Murray, and John Zysman. "Diffusing the Cloud: Cloud Computing and Implications for Public Policy" Journal of Industry, Competition and Trade 11:3 (September 2011), p.209-237.
Existing Citations
territory of storage (p.219): Major Cloud service providers such as Google and Microsoft distribute their datacenters across the world. A Hotmail or Gmail user never knows on what server, in which datacenter, and in which country their mailbox is stored. The technological advantages to this approach include significant levels of fault tolerance and disaster protection, a more responsive user experience regardless of location, and the ‘illusion’ of limitless scale provided by these services. However, every country in which the services are consumed, or in which the physical datacenters reside, has its own set of local policies and regulations bearing directly on electronic service provision and data protection. Legal issues such as information privacy, security, and legal jurisdiction are highly nation specific. In the US, for example, the Patriot Act allows the US government to demand disclosure of any data stored in any datacenter, anywhere in the world if that system is operated by a US-based company, broadly defined. That single law places US-based Cloud service providers such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others at a great disadvantage when competing for business in foreign markets. Governments, even close allies, will think twice about using US Cloud providers if their sensitive data can fall under the reach of this act. (†1576)
territory of storage (p.219-220): Europe is a challenging regulatory environment for Cloud providers, with stringent data privacy regulations and substantial differences between individual states. In many European jurisdictions users must actively consent to the collection and storage of their personal information. Providers must disclose on request what information is stored and in general, data about European citizens may not be stored or processed outside EU borders. Legal issues surrounding international jurisdiction and accountability have yet to be settled. For example, it is still unclear which rule of law applies for the arbitration of contract disputes–the country in which the service is consumed, or the country in which the service originated. In other words, is it Microsoft’s datacenter in Singapore or the US in which Microsoft is headquartered? (†1577)
