Europe’s love-hate affair with cloud computing
September 22, 2013
Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.
The conventional wisdom is that Europe is a few years behind the United States in cloud adoption, but interest in cloud deployment remains sky high. That perception was borne out by panelists and attendees at last week’s Structure:Europe event and other reports that show cloud adoption growing despite PRISM-generated concerns over data privacy, which have yet to be sorted out.
Last week, Viviane Reding, VP of the European Commission and the EU’s Commissioner for Justice, called for a single data privacy law to cover the entire European Union. Currently, some European countries — Germany and Switzerland, for example — have more iron-clad data sovereignty rules than others. According to a statement outlining the proposal, the proposed regulation is:…
“[T]he Union’s response to fear of surveillance. By adopting the Data Protection Regulation, the Union will equip it itself with a set of rules fit for the 21st century. Rules that will empower the very people whose data fuels the digital economy. Rules that will ensure the digital economy’s growth can be sustained.”
The value of E.U. citizens’ data in aggregate was €315 billion ($426 billion) in 2011 and could hit the I €1 trillion ($1.35 billion) annually in 2020, provided that trust issues that have arisen can be addressed, according to the European Union. A whopping 92 percent of Europeans worry about mobile apps collecting their data without their consent and 89 percent say they want to know when the data on their smartphone is being shared with third parties…
Read more from the source @ http://gigaom.com/2013/09/22/europes-love-hate-affair-with-cloud-computing-the-week-in-cloud/