Cloud computing may seem like an easy concept, but when it comes to compliance, that's certainly not the case.

Moving to a public cloud infrastructure means giving up some of the internal controls you have in place, which is why cloud regulations are crucial.

So, before you sign a contract with any cloud provider, you need to ask yourself: Are their services safe enough?

Here are some of the laws in the United States you should know to ensure legal cloud compliance:

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)

HIPAA regulations are designed to protect the privacy of healthcare information for individuals, when health care providers move to the cloud.

The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA)

This has two key rules for financial institutions storing data in the cloud: theFinancial Privacy Rule and the Safeguards Rule. The former deals with the customer’s personal information collected by an institution, while the latter deals with a security plan on how to keep personal information safe.

Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)

This was jointly developed by Visa and MasterCard to simplify compliance for merchants and payment processors. 

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

This will go into effect on May 25, 2018 and will give all citizens in the EU more control over their own data plus the right to data portability. 

This means if you handle or collect data from the EU, any EU customer could demand a copy of all personal data stored about them. This comes as no surprise why 92% of American companies state that GDPR compliance is one of their top priorities at the moment.

New Payment Service Directive (PSD2)

This also becomes effective at the start of 2018 and will open all banks' application programming interfaces (APIs) to third parties, such as Facebook and Google. 

This new law might be the downfall for organizations that are reluctant to change, but for modern companies embracing technology such as the cloud, the future looks bright.

Cloud computing that employs a public cloud model creates changes in the relationship between an organization and its information, with the cloud provider becoming the third party. Laws and regulations could pose challenges to the implementation of the public cloud, but they can be dealt with. 

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by this information, don’t worry. Any experienced cloud provider will have no problem helping you navigate through these changes. If you’re looking for one, consider the SimplyClouds team. We’ll keep you up to date about these regulations so you won’t need to sift through pages on end to understand how they will affect your business. We will keep your data safe and compliant.

If you have any questions on legal and regulatory issues regarding cloud providers, call us now. We're happy to advise.