Federal Cloud Report Advises Legal Holds

Businesses and government agencies should ensure their cloud suppliers have clear policies to apply litigation holds and preserve data, U.S. government officials said in a report Friday.

The 81-page report

The 81-page report, Cloud Computing Synopsis and Recommendations: Recommendations of the National Institute of Standards and Innovation, explains the research's definitions, network architectures, and current issues. It's free, and is authored by Lee Badger, Tim Grance, and Jeff Voas, all of NIST's computer security division, and Robert Patt-Corner, principal systems architect at government IT consultancy Global Tech.

The report does not exactly address law firms or legal departments, nevertheless NIST works directly with the legal research field in other ways. The institute sponsors the Text Retrieval Conference Legal Track, used for testing e-discovery software, and the National Software Reference Laboratory, whose software imaging catalog is used in e-discovery to automatically remove large amounts of non-responsive information.

Biannual conference

NIST as well sponsors a biannual conference, the Cloud Computing Forum and Workshop, straightway scheduled for June 5-7 in Washington, D.C. The workshop is a halfway mark of the second phase in a federal cloud computing project, NIST documents state.