Question

How can a cloud services consumer effectively manage their cloud application’s legal and regulatory compliance?

Context

One of the benefits of the cloud offerings is the reduction of the total cost of ownership, as well as the liability and responsibility for the functioning of the cloud infrastructure. Acquiring and managing own data centre to run applications bears a lot of hidden costs and regulatory and compliance requirements and risks, which can put a significant burden on an organisation.

Solution

In the early days of initial cloud service offerings, cloud providers offered only infrastructure-as-a-service, i.e. computing facilities where cloud tenants could install and run virtual machines. The natural responsibility for the uptime, reliability, availability and security of the infrastructure was on the cloud provider, while the tenants assumed responsibility for the choice, installation, maintenance and running of the VMs and the applications installed on them. As the cloud offerings grew into the more sophisticated platform-as-a-service domain, the responsibility for more and more functionality was assumed by the cloud providers.