As data volumes continue to experience exponential growth, companies of all sizes—even those that traditionally resisted the change—are embracing cloud computing. From a business perspective, the transition to the cloud allows organizations to manage data, reduce costs, and take advantage of the efficiencies and analytics offered by third-party cloud providers.

From a legal perspective, though, the cloud introduces a unique shared responsibility model that many businesses are only now coming to appreciate—specifically, although the cloud provider may house the data and provide functionality for access and data security, the legal obligations remain the responsibility of the business procuring these services.

In fact, for the two most important security controls—access and data—responsibility rests wholly with the business procuring the service.