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SCL, Open and Cloud

Several members of the QMUL Cloud Legal Project featured prominently at the Society for Computers and Law’s fifth annual Policy Forum, which took place in London this week. This year’s Policy Forum concentrated on the topic of ‘Open’, and a range of talks and panels explored the importance and implications of ‘openness’ in IT, be it in software, data or standards.  

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Professors Ian Walden and Professor Chris Reed took part in panels on Open Source Software and Open Culture, whilst Simon Bradshaw chaired the Forum’s panel on Open Cloud. The Open Cloud panel also featured Dervish Tayyip, Microsoft UK, Head of Legal, Bridget Treacy, of Hunton and Williams, and Tim Cowen of the Open Computing Alliance. (Regrettably Amanda Brock, General Counsel of Canonical, was unable to take part.) Topics of discussion ranged from the extent to which Microsoft is being driven towards Open standards for Cloud services, the data implication and privacy implications of migrating to Cloud, and the desirability or otherwise of EU regulation in this area.  

It was clear both from the discussion itself and the audience questions it prompted that this is a significant, if sometimes neglected, aspect of Cloud computing. The abstracted and virtualised nature of Cloud services may well seem to offer an attractive alternative to proprietary hardware, but in practice a customer is likely to have to carefully tailor applications to port them to the Cloud, and in doing so will invest significant effort in compliance with the chosen Cloud vendor’s technology. We are still some way from the point at which customers can freely move data and applications between Cloud providers; having said that, one of the points raised in the panel discussion was that a premature rush to enforce standards on the Cloud industry might, perversely, have the effect of discouraging the innovation that might of itself lead to greater interoperability. How the regulators approach this matter will be a topic we at the Cloud Legal Project will be following with much interest.

 

 

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