Business in the Cloud
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upgrade their IT premises proportionally to the development of the market
(
Riethmüller, 2012, pp. 24-26). The emergence of cloud services like Dropbox,
Microsoft Office 365, or Google Docs - just to name a few of them – led to a change
of thinking: It is now possible to expand an existing IT infrastructure, by performing
a “virtual upgrade”, instead of spending enormous amounts of money for a new
software, applications, or servers.
6.1
Prerequisites
Due to regulations and restrictions by national laws, some industry sectors as well
as countries prohibit or limit the outsourcing of business relevant data into the cloud.
Thus it is absolutely crucial for employees in an executive position to first determine
if there are areas within their field business which prohibit the usage of cloud related
services and to evaluate potential risks that might be associated with remote
computing (McAfee & Brynjolfsson, 2012, p. 60) & (Mather, Kumaraswamy, & Latif,
2009,
pp. 33-34).
Especially in the medical industry, data security and strict regulations about the
handling of patient and treatment related data, can become an obstacle when
deciding to outsource specific processes into the cloud. Therefore it is a mandatory
act to first lay a strong focus on regulations, laws, security issues, as well as
potential risks. The United States Health Insurance Portability and Accountability
Act, enacted in 1996, provides a strict guideline on how to handle patients related
data, including transfer, access controls, and audits (Blaisdell, 2013). The European
Union on the other hand prohibits the transfer of customer data to another country
without prior approval. The “Safe Harbor” treaty gives Member States the
opportunity to circumvent the restriction of data transfer by providing proof that data
protection in their respective country complies with the high standard requested by
the statues of EU law (European Commission, 2012).
Taking into consideration the above mentioned regulations, a company needs to
focus on the question: Where and how is my data stored in the cloud? For this
purpose many Cloud Service providers design their offers in a way that they can
