European and US cloud providers go head-to-head after NSA revelations

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Mikael Ricknäs.

European cloud providers think the U.S. spy scandal will result in more enterprises choosing local alternatives over the likes of Amazon Web Services and Rackspace, which, on the other hand, are adamant that they aren’t taking part in programs such as Prism.

The debate over U.S. access to cloud data that the Patriot Act helped fuel has once again become a hot topic in the wake of revelations about surveillance programs such as Prism, under which the U.S. government is said to have access to data on servers supplied by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple and Skype…

"I think it will be really damaging for U.S. companies in terms of competing abroad. It is not something we have played up when marketing our services, but it is a fact that customers are going to discriminate," said Robert Jenkins, CEO at Swiss company CloudSigma. Generally, the news about Prism and other programs will have a big effect on people’s confidence in using the Internet, according to Johan Christenson, CEO at City Network from Sweden…

Read more from the source @ http://www.itworld.com/cloud-computing/361008/european-and-us-cloud-providers-go-head-head-after-nsa-revelations