By IT-Lex Intern Joey Chindamo (LinkedIn)

Cloud computing has become second nature in the Internet age. Services like Dropbox, Google Drive, and iCloud put all your data at your fingertips, accessible by any Internet-connected device. With cloud storage, gone are the days of carrying a USB flash drive or backing up data onto external hard drives—as long as you have an Internet connection, you have access to your data.

Similarly, virtual offices and cloud computing in the legal sector are becoming more and more prevalent. The ability to keep all client data in the cloud, communicate exclusively by e-mail, and conduct client meetings via Skype gives attorneys immeasurable convenience and significant cost savings. But with those benefits come concerns, especially when it comes to ethical confidentiality. Cloud storage has distinct pitfalls in the eDiscovery realm, too.

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A couple of articles published yesterday suggest that, despite the approval of many state bars (including Massachusetts), the use of cloud computing still has a long way to go before it is widely-trusted by the legal profession. Tech Week Europe reported about a survey that highlights the most-common concerns:

Government regulations, exit strategies and international data privacy led the list of concerns that are eroding business confidence in cloud computing, according to findings from a joint survey by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and ISACA (previously known as the Information Systems Audit and Control Association).

Privacy and overall data security is something we’ve addressed before, when a lightning storm knocked out the Amazon cloud server. It’s one thing to lose power due to inclement weather, but if you’re a lawyer whose important (and sensitive) client documents are all temporarily inaccessible, that’s a serious problem.

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Speaking of emerging technologies, how about that cloud computing? When they’re not getting knocked out by storms, cloud systems are incredibly popular places for companies to remotely and inexpensively store huge amounts of – often sensitive or confidential – data. Issues of data security and ownership have abounded since cloud computing became a major force, and so it can be a murky area for lawyers, as to how they store privileged client information. To that end, the Massachusetts Bar Association just became only the 11th state to address the issue, and became the 11th state to declare use of the cloud ethical for lawyers. Of course, this being the law, there are caveats. Let the Catalyst Secure Blog explain:

The Massachusetts Bar Association has issued an ethics opinion concluding that lawyers may use cloud services to store and synchronize digital files containing client information, provided the lawyer takes reasonable measures to ensure that the service’s terms of use and data-privacy policies are compatible with the lawyer’s professional obligations. However, lawyers should not use cloud services for clients who expressly request that their documents not be stored online and lawyers should not store “particularly sensitive” information in the cloud without first obtaining the client’s express consent, the opinion says.

In case you’re wondering, Florida, home-state of IT-Lex, is not one of the 11 states to have addressed the matter yet.

As you’re probably aware, large swathes of the east coast were hit by huge storms over the last few days. In addition to causing at least eighteen deaths, these storms have led to millions – yes, millions – of homeowners being without left without power. The Amazon Cloud server in Virginia was hit by a stray lightning strike on Friday evening, which led to many popular web services being down. Netflix, Instragram and Pinterest are just three of the widely-used web applications which suffered outages as a result. (Fortunately, Twitter was unaffected, so we could enjoy some funny tweets about the situation).

In addition to the aforementioned sites, Amazon’s Cloud (aka Amazon Web Services) also hosts sites for almost two hundred government agencies, as well as Unilever and Intercontinental Hotels. None of these reported any loss of service, though. The weather continued to play havoc on servers and technology on Sunday evening, when ESPN lost its feed of the Euro 2012 final for about five minutes.

Incidentally, one of our Members, Peter S. Vogel, recently gave a great interview about some of the legal issues facing cloud computing, and you can watch that here.

Source: New York Times