“The CFO Playbook on Cloud: The Legal Issues CFOs Must Know About” webcast

Description

Andrew Goldstein, a Partner in the Corporate Practice Group of Freeborn & Peters LLP, will join Ashley Fieglein Johnson, CFO of ServiceSource as co Panelists to discuss the legal risks and recent legal precedents of cloud-based financial systems. This panel will be moderated by Russ Banham, Senior Writer at CFO Magazine and author of The Ford Century, The Flight for Fairfax.

ABOUT THE WEBCAST

No one can fault CFOs for being immensely interested in the value offered by cloud-based financial systems. Such hosted platforms have the horsepower to provide great reach, easy deployment and wide flexibility, and the costs are highly manageable. While no one disagrees that cloud systems are unstoppable, CFOs need to carefully weigh complex legal and regulatory challenges and the provider's privacy and security controls before jumping feet first. Certainly, the possibility of vital or sensitive data being lost, stolen or corrupted is a dire legal and reputational threat.

There are also complicated federal, state and even international laws imposing responsibilities on both vendors and cloud users that warrant focused attention. Few CFOs are fully cognizant of the jurisdictional issues that may arise when a cloud network crosses international boundaries. Many laws also are spread across different industry sectors, such as HIPAA in health care, Gramm-Leach-Bliley in financial services, and PCI in retail, conspiring to complicate the legal landscape further. New regulations are highly likely.

Few legal precedents have emerged to provide clarity on the management of cloud litigation and regulatory risks. And the wording within some cloud contracts can be, well, cloudy, as to which entity bears the cost of a security breach and the consequent legal and regulatory actions.

As more companies become dependent on cloud-based services, CFOs must take a more forceful role in asking tough questions before jumping on the bandwagon. These and other worrisome data security, litigation and regulatory exposures require more systematic identification, assessment and mitigation. During this Webcast, a distinguished panel of experts will address:

• The legal risks that confront both providers and tenants of cloud services;
• How to assess a vendor's security protocols and operational practices to limit security and other risks;
• The regulations currently on the books affecting cloud users in different industries, and those in the offing (The European Union is at work on a cloud-based uniform model);
• Contract due diligence, risk management and best practices; and
• Licensing restrictions and patent issues in the cloud environment.

To register for this live webcast, please register with CFO Magazine and proceed to register for this event by clicking here.