Results 1-10 of 75
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Health Care in the Cloud - Think You Are Doing Fine on Cloud Nine? Hey, You! Think Again. Better Get Off of My Cloud.
August 04, 2011
The interest level in storing health records in digital format has grown rapidly with the lower cost and greater availability and reliability of interoperable storage mechanisms and devices. Health care providers like hospitals and health systems, physician practices, and health insurance companies are among those most likely to be considering a cloud-based solution for the storage of patient-related health information. While lower cost, ubiquitous 24/7 availability, and reliability are key drivers pushing health care providers and insurers to the cloud, a number of serious legal and regulatory issues should be considered before releasing sensitive patient data into the cloud. This article seeks to highlight some of those concerns and considerations.
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Case Study: Bauman V. DaimlerChrysler Corp.
July 06, 2011
Recently, the Ninth Circuit issued its decision in Bauman v. DaimlerChrysler Corp., ---F.3d ---, 2011 WL 1879210, a potentially transformative case that expands the use of "agency theory" to impose general jurisdiction over foreign corporations that do business in the U.S. solely through their U.S. subsidiaries.
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Cloud Computing in Advertising & Marketing: Looking for the Silver Lining, Making Rain
June 20, 2011
Advances in digital wired and wireless technology are rapidly expanding both the types of media and the devices that advertising, marketing and brand professionals can use to reach consumers. Not only is the B2C landscape changing, but even B2B marketing is undergoing rapid and often radical shifts in tactics, techniques, challenges and opportunities.
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Proposed Repeal of California Enterprise Zone Benefits Would Violate the Contracts and Due Process Clauses of the California and United States Constitutions
February 18, 2011
Communities to Save Enterprise Zones has asked Reed Smith to articulate the legal case against Governor Brown's proposal to repeal the benefits associated with California's Enterprise Zone Program, including elimination of Enterprise Zone Benefits already earned and vested. In the pages that follow, we explain why the proposed repeal is more than just poor public policy. (That much is intuitive: Government should not target a specific group by deliberately inducing them to engage in specific, substantial action and then - after convincing them to perform those actions - take away the vested rights members of that group earned in exchange.) The purpose of this memorandum is to explain the reasons why this particular poor public policy is also illegal state action, and thus just as impermissible as it is imprudent.
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Look, Up in the Cloud…It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s a Bank
January 25, 2011
The financial services industry, being one of the largest global consumers of technology, often serves as a driver of change as new banking and financial products and services are introduced into the information, transaction processing, storage and communications pipeline. Cloud computing as both a product and service of sorts will likely be no exception. The value propositions presented by utilization of cloud computing environments, such as cost containment, immediacy, availability, scalability, efficiency and resiliency, will simply be too attractive for chief operating and information technology officers to ignore. However, as highly regulated businesses, financial services firms will be forced to develop sound policy and governance practices to manage the risks that come with utilization of a third-party IT platform.
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Tying Up the Cloud: A Study in Antitrust Issues in Cloud Computing
September 08, 2010
The cloud computing era represents a significant shift in relationships in the information technology field. This shift will raise many antitrust questions, among other legal issues. Many antitrust questions will not become apparent until cloud computing business models become better established, but some issues are readily apparent even at the threshold.
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Cloud Coverage
August 23, 2010
Where clouds form, rain follows. Insurance should be there to protect you. This article outlines steps to consider so that coverage holds when the rain hits.
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Cloud Computing - A German Perspective
August 13, 2010
Traditionally, companies have devoted significant percentages of their overall budget to managing, supporting and scaling their own IT systems and networks. A company’s growth and the size of its IT infrastructure typically have had a direct correlation. Until recently, a company’s IT infrastructure options were restricted to incrementally scaling up internal capacity or outsourcing to third parties, all or some portion of the IT infrastructure. While the build vs. buy paradigm offers a variety of benefits and challenges, the balance—indeed the benefits and challenges—are in a constant and dynamic state of review and re-evaluation. Especially in an economically challenging environment, companies eagerly search for new solutions to their IT sourcing challenges—solutions that offer reliability, scalability, security, and a difference in their capital and operating expense budgets.
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E-Discovery and the Cloud: Best Practices in the New Frontier
July 23, 2010
During the past five years or so, lawyers and their clients have struggled to reconcile their discovery obligations under federal and state discovery rules with the ever-expanding digital universe. Indeed, as technology continues to evolve, the digital sea of electronically stored information ("ESI") produced by companies continues to rise. Consequently, the costs associated with creating new information technology (or "IT") infrastructure, and with maintaining and preserving (or hosting) ESI, also continue to rise. In many cases, the duality of rising costs and increased technological complexity have led companies to look to third-party providers for some or all of their infrastructure and hosting needs. In fact, third-party hosts and IT service providers of varying sizes and offerings are essentially a ubiquitous reality in our digital economy today. Consequently, it should not be a surprise that cloud computing represents a natural, albeit somewhat different, model in the evolution of the use of IT.
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Pennies From Heaven – U.S. State Tax Implications Within Cloud Computing
June 17, 2010
Faced with growing budget deficits and decreasing tax bases, some states in the United States are searching for new and broader avenues for revenue generation. Digital products and electronic commerce are two of the most notable, recent targets in the states’ search for revenue. Just as many states have begun to expand their sales-tax laws to reach digital products, such as music, software, and audio-visual downloads, the cloud computing phenomenon, and the shift from downloaded products to Internet-based access to applications and data “in the cloud,” has the potential to once again take a large segment of digital transactions outside of the states’ taxing reach.