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You are viewing ARCHIVED CONTENT released online between 1 April 2010 and 24 August 2018 or content that has been selectively archived and is no longer active. Content in this archive is NOT UPDATED, and links may not function.Extract from article by Jim Duffy, Esq.
The legal practitioners’ security debate focuses on whether the legal world should be using cloud or cloud-like offerings during the course of their practice—whether that practice is as part of an in-house legal team or with a firm. As the debate has developed, organizations (mostly local bar associations) have promulgated general guidelines arguing that legal practitioners should use reasonable care when selecting cloud-based solutions. This debate does focus on providing general guidelines but provides little in the way of actual technical assistance.
On the other hand, there is the vendor’s security debate about what the legal cloud should look like—how it should be secured, what practitioners should look for with their services, and what type of standards should be adopted by legal cloud providers to guarantee safety. Certain groups, such as the Legal Cloud Computing Association (LCCA), are calling for the adoption of industry-wide standards, but other groups, mostly individual vendors, argue that set standards would be unnecessarily limiting and quickly surpassed by the general trend of computing, therefore becoming obsolete.
One concern with the development of a legal industry-specific standard is the concern that the standard would not be sufficiently agile and able to respond to the changes in IT security. Ultimately, if an industry-wide standard is adopted who will oversee the standard and enforce the standard among the vendors (i.e. will there be any teeth to the standard, if there are not, will end-users be able to rely on the standard as a demonstration that a particular cloud or cloud-like solution will ensure their data).
Read the complete article at Identifying the Best Cloud Practices for Your Organization