JISC has released Digital Curation and the Cloud: Final Report. This is a revised version of the draft report that was released earlier this year.
Here’s an excerpt:
Digital curation involves a wide range of activities, many of which may be suitable for deployment within a cloud environment. These range from infrequent, resource-intensive tasks which will benefit from the ability to rapidly provision resources, to day-to-day collaborative activities which can be facilitated by networked cloud services. Associated benefits are offset by risks such as loss of data or service level, legal and governance incompatibilities and transfer bottlenecks. There is considerable variability across both risks and benefits according to the service and deployment models being adopted and the context in which activities are performed. Some risks, such as legal liabilities, are mitigated by the use of alternatives, for example, private cloud models, but this is typically at the expense of benefits such as resource elasticity and economies of scale.