Submitted by:Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Analyst CMS Watch

Last week I hosted a panel forARMA that discussed compliance and records management issues related to Cloud Computing. It proved to be one of the most thought-provoking sessions I have been involved in for a long time. For what became abundantly clear from very early on was that records managers and compliance officers really need to get their head around Cloud Computing, and fast.

In the session we spent some time explaining that for every vendor out there that claims to have a Cloud solution, only one in ten really has. That “Cloud” relates to a virtualized world utilizing the internet as a network — whereas hosted and SaaS options (the 9 out of ten) almost always have a specific data center location that they operate from.

This short blog entry is no place to get into the intricacies of this topic, so suffice it to say for now that with most hosted and SaaS options you can impose an SLA that will tell you, at any time you need to know, exactly where your data resides. With a true Cloud option, this is simply impossible – nobody (literally nobody) actually knows where your data resides. That is currently a complete no-no for most regulated data.

Continues @ http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1716-Cloud-Computing-Records-Management

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