Cloud providers warn against EU 'over-regulation'

http://ow.ly/6UUZK

Article by Valentina Pop posted on the euobserver.com website.

This article discusses the EU's concern regarding possible privacy rights violations by Cloud based computing service providers.

The article discusses a warning against over regulation of cloud computing services by the EU.  The author writes, ""The reality of cloud is that it has been there for a while, it's just the name that's new," said Karim Lesima, executive director at AT&T Europe.

A booming market expected to surpass €175 billion by 2020 compared to €29 billion last year, cloud computing is now on offer by a wide range of companies, including telecommunications providers such as AT&T, internet giants such as Amazon and Google or computer-maker Apple. But with this myriad of cloud providers come the problems of no longer having complete control over one's data and of new forms of exposure to data theft."

The article provides additional interesting quotes from Karim Lesima, one of which is as follows, ""...The European Commission has a tough role to find a compromise between ensuring a good level of privacy for the citizens and also promoting the development of cloud, which would increase competitiveness of European companies and reduce costs.""

The article goes on further to point out, "Data location is intrinsically linked to the issue of jurisdiction - a major headache for EU legislators and companies alike.

Since data can be split and stored in multiple locations within and outside the EU, it would be unclear how inconsistencies among those jurisdictions would be resolved in case of abuse or a data breach, a recent report by the World Economic Forum says."  A link to the World Economic Forum's report is provided in the article.