Legal Regulation of Cloud Services: Current State and Development Prospects

The relevance of the study is due to the rapid development of the digital economy and the large-scale implementation of cloud computing, which requires comprehensive legal regulation of the cloud services market. In Ukraine, a significant regulatory imbalance exists: while the public sector is extensively regulated, the private segment remains legally fragmented and vulnerable. The goal is a comprehensive comparative legal analysis of the state of legislative regulation of relations in the field of providing cloud services in Ukraine and the European Union and substantiation of ways to overcome the regulatory imbalance between the public and private sectors. The research employs formal-legal, comparative-legal, systemic-structural, dialectical, and statistical methods. Critical gaps were identified in Ukrainian cloud legislation regarding consumer protection and private business safeguards. Drawing upon EU regulatory standards (including the Digital Services Act and Directive (EU) 2019/770), the study justifies the need to establish mandatory contractual safeguards, standardized Service Level Agreements (SLAs), data portability, and service interoperability within private cloud contracts, thereby mitigating systemic legal imbalances.