As you probably know, Safe Harbor acting for European personal data in the US from 2000 was recently ruled out by the ECJ (European Court of Justice) to be insufficient. This changes a lot the background for cloud computing consumers in Europe.
OK, what is this all about bit by bit:
- Europe has its own privacy laws. This is related to the European citizens personal data protection and is regulated by the Data Protection Directive from 1995.
- There are a lot of transnational US businesses that are storing, aggregating, analyzing the global customer data in the US-based datacenters. Such businesses can be of infrastructure level (like cloud services providers, hosting services, etc.), online services (social networks, blog platforms, search engines, etc.), e-commerce players and so on.
- Safe Harbor Privacy Principles were developed starting from 1998 and enacted in 2000 to make it possible for the European personal data to travel transatlantic and be handled there in safe manner.
- Last several years revelations of NSA activities and USA Patriot Act enforcement that are bypassing the European personal data protection and privacy laws.
- Safe Harbor is not sufficient to protect European citizens personal data anymore, as ruled by the court in 2015.
What will be the most likely consequences? Will it help European CSPs to rise and gain the market share? Will this create the workplaces in Europe? How will this boost the cloud consulting companies?
What we can see to the moment, the big US CSPs are opening more datacenters to keep the European data (and metadata) in Europe:
- Microsoft announced the plans for UK expansion in 2016 (Azure, Office 365 services datacenter): http://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-plans-open-new-data-centers-uk
- Amazon announced the new cloud datacenter to open in UK in 2017: http://fortune.com/2015/11/06/amazon-web-services-uk-data-center/
One one hand, cloud infrastructure business is a mass market with it's low margin economy, it is only possible to compete there having the global scope and huge resources. So probably Safe Harbor strike down will not significantly help any new European players to benefit from this situation, however new datacenters to be open in Europe should add more workplaces in EU member countries.
One the other hand, Europe has it's own strategy for the cloud computing (https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/european-cloud-computing-strategy), C4E (Cloud-for-Europe) initiative, ECP (European Cloud Partnership, https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/european-cloud-partnership) organization, so why not to coordinate/implement something of a level of pan-european CSP?
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