Public policy and regulatory implications for the implementation of Opportunistic Cloud Computing Services for Enterprises

Opportunistic Cloud Computing Services (OCCS) is a social network approach to the provisioning and management of cloud computing services for enterprises. This paper discusses how public policy and regulations will impact on OCCS implementation. We rely on documented publicly available government and corporate policies on the adoption of cloud computing services and deduce the impact of these policies on their adoption of opportunistic cloud computing services. We conclude that there are regulatory challenges on data protection that raises issues for cloud computing adoption in general; and the lack of a single globally accepted data protection standard poses some challenges for very successful implementation of OCCS for companies. However, the direction of current public and corporate policies on cloud computing make a good case for them to try out opportunistic cloud computing services.