Cloud Computing

Introduction

Companies can use cloud services in a variety of different fashions, each presenting discovery issues that lawyers will face, some of which are addressed by present e-discovery law, and others that will be the concern of future cases. At its most basic level, cloud services such as Amazon's Simple Storage Service (“S3″) store a consumer's ESI on the cloud, rather than the consumer's own networks. Beyond mere information storage, the use of hardware and software can also be provided over the Internet as a service. For example, a cloud can provide a consumer with temporary access to an IT infrastructure when the consumer's need for computing power spikes, without the need to maintain or pay for that power when it is no longer needed. For example, The New York Times used Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud (“EC2″) service to convert 11 million articles (every New York Times article from 1851-1980) to PDF format in under 24 hours. The EC2 service allocated sufficient computing power to The New York Times during the course of its project, and then subsequently reallocated those resources to other users after the project was complete. See Derek Gottfrid, Self-Service, Prorated Super Computing Fun, NY Times, Nov. 1, 2007, http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/01/self-service-prorated-super-computing-fun (last visited March 26, 2009).