The move to cloud computing is no longer a trend, but a land rush.
Already, many entities, including those in highly regulated service areas such as the financial services industry, are utilizing cloud services, in some instances hosting their most sensitive data. By leveraging economies of scale, commoditizing services, geographic distribution, and open source software to lower costs, cloud computing has become an increasingly attractive option for businesses. The question is no longer whether a business will move to the cloud, but when it does will it have the processes in place to effectively balance the risks and rewards of cloud computing.
Cloud computing is not without substantial risk, particularly at a time when businesses of almost every kind are finding themselves subject to an ever expanding range of state and federal data security and privacy laws, document retention requirements, and other standards of accountability. This is reflected in the primary area of cloud
