Today in Cloud
European governments are giving a leg-up to local cloud service providers over competitors in the U.S., sparked by concerns over U.S. regulations that they believe are an invasion of privacy, according to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle. Both France and Germany are working with local telecom providers and hosting companies to spread the word among customers in Europe their data is not secure in the hands of U.S. cloud providers. The Netherlands has gone as far as excluding U.S. companies from bidding for IT services by its government, citing fears that the U.S. Patriot Act may allow data to be compromised. As more European companies request to have data stored locally, U.S. cloud providers may increasingly have to divvy up contracts with local providers, the report said. While I get the fear that European businesses have about the Patriot Act, I think it’s going to be hard for companies in Europe to ignore the global nature of business these days. Data is everywhere, on mobile devices as employees travel internationally and it most likely already exists in cloud storage services hosted in the U.S., like Dropbox. Banning users from services usually ends up with them going around the IT department and creating some kind of hack in order to use the service anyway. This is less secure than working on a safe way to use these services. My hunch would be that if European governments are serious about data privacy and this isn’t just a protectionism thing, they ought to figure out how to work with U.S. service providers to store content in a location they are comfortable with.