The interest in cloud services has grown rapidly over the last few years. It is reported that public spending on the procurement of cloud services is estimated to have reached USD 107 billion by the year 2017. The rapid development of cloud services is driven by cloud characteristics, such as: elasticity, scalability, universal access, low entry cost, flexible and adjustable billing and easy metering.
On the other hand, moving business activity to the cloud is also subject to significant challenges and risks, such as, in particular, compliance, security, privacy as well as competition issues (including vendor lock-in). Those challenges and risks are mostly driven by lack of a uniform regulatory framework devoted to cloud computing activity, the complexity of service models and service delivery over the cloud, the low awareness of cloud computing service provisioning by both vendors and regulators due to, among other things, insufficient governmental information campaigns on the benefits and risks of cloud services.
The subject of this workshop is to discuss, from a practical point of view, the legal and regulatory barriers to the development of cloud services. During the workshop, the existing sources of law will be outlined and discussed from a national and international perspective, in the context of various, differentiating cloud definitions, cloud service models and different subject matter of such services. In addition, future regulations such as, for example, the General Data Protection Regulation and its impact on the cloud regulatory framework, will be discussed. The discussion will also encompass the practical and legal issues related to cloud standardization and the extent to which standardization may support, from a practical perspective, the legal framework related to the cloud environment. The workshop will also cover issues related to service procurement, including the contents of cloud contracts, Service Level contracts and the enforcement of such contracts. The risks connected with cloud contracts from the perspective of cloud vendors, including state and local government vendors and private vendors, cloud service providers and brokers as well as auditors, will be discussed. The workshop will also include a discussion on legal and practical issues involved in auditing cloud services, as well as issues related to legal and regulatory barriers connected with internet (cloud) access services.