The recent demise of a file sharing service highlights the risks for colleges and universities in considering a move to the cloud or other external service providers. Megaupload was closed down and its assets frozen in mid January by the US authorities investigating the sharing of copyright infringing materials. It outsourced storage of users uploads to third party providers who are currently not being paid for provision of the storage service and have therefore threatened to delete the data. In addition at least one of the storage providers has stated that it has no access to the content stored for Megaupload and no means of returning the content direct to Megaupload’s users. This has resulted in the prospect of the content of the servers being deleted due to non payment and the resulting loss of data to those users who have uploaded legitimate data including data such as family photographs. Similar issues also have to be addressed when a college or university is considering using cloud computing services. It reinforces the need for colleges and universities to carry out due diligence checks on their proposed cloud and other service providers to ascertain as far as possible the status and robustness of the provider prior to entering into a contract in order to minimise the risk of restricted access to the data or at worse a total loss of data.
The news story is available from the BBC website at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16787486
JISC Legal’s Cloud Computing Toolkit is available as an aid in making informed decisions about implementing cloud computing solutions- http://jiscleg.al/CloudComputingToolkit