Ethical Considerations in Cloud Computing Systems

Cloud computing is a new generation of computing systems, increasingly developing as a promising solution to deal with the explosion of computing complexity and data size. One of the main concerns to shift from traditional computing systems to Cloud is ethics. In many cases, ethical issues depend on particular applications and circumstances. However, we intend to identify ethical issues of Cloud, inherent in the fundamental nature of the technology rather than specific circumstances. There are multiple technological criteria affecting ethical issues in Cloud, such as security; privacy; compliance and performance metrics. Along with the technological criteria, a set of rules and regulations called Terms and Conditions (T&C) effects on ethics in the Cloud. T&C is an agreement specifying the rights and obligations of users, Cloud providers and third parties. In this ongoing research work, we aim to firstly investigate the main technological criteria affecting ethics in Cloud, while at the same time, we provide a discussion to indicate that how each of these criteria influences ethics, secondly to consider the relationship between the T&C rules and ethics, and finally to have a quick look at ethical issues in Cloud versus traditional web-based applications.