Will using Dropbox put your CEO in jail?

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Janko Roettgers.

With everything moving to the cloud, companies suddenly find themselves confronted with a whole new set of challenges. For example: Is all that stuff even legal? “There is a good chance that almost every organization that is out there that is using Dropbox or that is using Box is breaking the law,” proclaimed Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies (see disclosure) during the last panel of the day at GigaOM’s Structure conference Thursday.

Kanies wasn’t out to scare people, but he had a point: Most companies don’t even have internal rules for the use of data with cloud services, save for a clear understanding of the law. Fellow panelist and enStratus VP of Product Strategy James Urquhart agreed, pointing out that courts have yet to device whether Fourth Amendment rights apply to documents saved in the cloud…

But legal issues like these are only one of the challenges facing companies as they move away from infrastructure-centric to app-centric architectures. The other is that people have to adopt an entirely new way of thinking. “A lot of organizations have problems with the application structure,” said Paremus CEO and Founder Richard Nicholson, and his co-panelists agreed: Putting apps at the center makes it necessary to rethink how companis are spending their money, and who makes the decisions about services. For example, Logicworks VP of Network Operations and Engineering Stephanie Tayengco said that she sees a lot of IT requests come from creative types, as opposed to CIOs.

Of course, that shift also comes with tremendous opportunities: When IT provides a platform to run apps for people to experiment as opposed to decide on every single project, great things can happen. And if IT isn’t ready for that, employees will just bring their own services to the work place and upload things to their personal Dropbox account. “One of the reasons is that if you ask your IT, whatever the question is, they say no,” quipped Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies. So people don’t ask, but start doing. Which is great, despite any potential legal challenges. Said Kanies: “It can be a low-risk way of letting that small team play with something.”