Thunder clouds or clear blue skies - business use of 'cloud' services

As private and public sector organizations seek to develop policies and to manage the remodelling and restyling of their e-services, the 'cloud' arouses much interest and attention. 'Cloud' computing suppliers provide not only a service to store data on behalf of customers but also provide applications and data analysis services. The paper's purpose is to examine how business organizations can address the risks in using 'cloud' computing, offering new insights from the legal profession as an analogy. An inductive interpretivist narrative is used with the conclusion providing new insight and a distinctive contribution into how businesses can be guided by the legal profession in its use of 'cloud' computing technology, and the reality that information whether in electronic or physical form is susceptible to theft, loss or inadvertent disclosure.