For various reasons, in many countries and regions of the world, the authorities in one way or another express their reservations as well as concerns about the increasingly intense and extensive use of cloud computing in the zones of their influence.
Many countries have adopted 30 very strict and restrictive privacy regulations that prohibit the storage of certain data on physical media and devices located outside that country. Organizations and the people within them have been severely punished for violating such laws. Any organization that stores sensitive cloud data must be able to prove that their cloud computing provider does not store such data on physical servers outside a particular geographic area. For example, if data is stored somewhere in Europe, a cloud computing provider from the United States will need to know European regulations that in some cases are quite different than the US ones in order to avoid problems in Europe and the US.
In addition, many professional associations, business associations, and interest groups develop their own regulations that do not have legal force but nevertheless have great influence within such a community. Examples include regulations in the areas of financial services and banking, the issuance and use of payment cards, health care, the pharmaceutical industry, air and maritime transport, and so on. Such regulations usually stem from best practices and become mandatory for members and members of the particular association.
All these real-world events are mapped into the virtual world of a computer cloud. For example, if a virtual machine is activated in a cloud, can an application processing on that machine access sensitive data? It is the so-called gray zone that many experts have recognized, but legislative institutions are currently far from concerning that practice, but it is almost certain that appropriate regulations will soon appear in that area. New laws can result in heavy costs for organizations that use cloud computing, because new provisions need to be implemented, and this will certainly require the introduction of certain changes to current existing practices.