The cloud may not be right for all, of course. IT lawyer Peter Wainman, senior solicitor in the technology and commerce team at law firm Mills & Reeve, warns that companies are still liable for data protection, so must scrutinise service-level agreements. “Many cloud hosts won’t be held liable for downtime or loss of content, IP or data. You need to ensure you retain control and must be aware of the scope of the hosting agreement,” he says.

This issue of control appears to a major reason for not all content owners being convinced by the cloud. Property site Rightmove’s head of development Nathan Barron says, “I’m not sure we’d seriously consider the cloud as we’d be concerned we were giving away control over our content. We mostly work through estate agents using our site to sell or rent properties, and they expect details to be updated instantly and the site always to be available. We store our database in three locations to make sure we’re always up — we could lose one set of servers without impacting the site’s performance. I really don’t think we’d be able to confidently offer that level of service if we didn’t control the servers ourselves.”

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