The Cloud Legal Project (CLP) undertakes research in complex areas of law and regulation that are essential to the successful development and use of cloud computing services.
The CLP was launched in 2009 by members of the Centre for Commercial Law Studies (CCLS) at Queen Mary University of London with generous financial support from Microsoft Corporation. Since 2014, we have also been collaborating with the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge as part of the Microsoft Cloud Computing Research Centre (see mccrc.eu).
For more information about the Cloud Legal Project's history and how we work, check out the Spring 2019 edition of the CCLS Alumni Bulletin.
Cloud computing (also known as 'the cloud') is essentially a means of providing computing resources as a service via the Internet. The cloud market is evolving rapidly with major investments being made in infrastructure, platforms, and applications, all delivered 'as a service'. The demand for cloud resources is enormous, with numerous growth drivers including the very large scale deployment of mobile apps, the rapid emergence of the Internet of Things, widespread use of data analytics, and the emergence of technologies such as cloud-based machine learning and robotics. The overall commercial and societal impact of the cloud is substantial. Nevertheless, there is currently considerable uncertainty as to the legal and regulatory status of several essential aspects of cloud computing.
The CLP aims to reduce that uncertainty via the production and dissemination of an extensive range of scholarly yet practical research papers. The CLP team is based at the Centre for Commercial Law Studies (CCLS) at Queen Mary University of London. CCLS has extensive relevant expertise and experience and has a leading reputation in all aspects of computer and communications law and regulation.
The Queen Mary Cloud Legal Project is funded primarily via generous charitable donations from Microsoft, with past additional support from the European Commission. Our research is academically independent of Microsoft, the European Commission and any other funding body.