Foreign cloud vendors are waking up to the fact that European companies need data stored locally.
Already there has been concerns within the EU that some of the larger multinational cloud vendors are trying to score lucrative contracts in Europe.
The problem is that many foreign countries have laws which require their companies to turn over any data to their intelligence agencies.
In the US the Patriot Act requires all US companies to hand over data if the Government wants it. That means that if EU data crosses the pond it can become US government property.
UK customers of Megaupload found that out the hard way when their data was seized as part of a copyright dispute between the US government and the company..
Similar problems exist with companies that connect to Indian outsourcers which have cloud operations. Although it has not happened yet, data can be seized by Indian spooks under their terrorism acts.
The EU has been issuing warnings to companies that they could be in trouble if their data levels the boundaries of the trade bloc.
Last year, Sophia In’t Veld, a member of the Parliament’s civil liberties committee complained that the way it was worded US Patriot Act effectively overrules the EU Directive on Data Protection. She called for the Commission to remedy this situation.
Now it seems that the foreign vendors are starting to listen and are getting around the problem by setting up local clouds in the EU.
The latest idea has come from the ResellerClub, one of the world’s largest providers of Web Presence Products. It is now offering its resellers Hosting and Shared Hosting on Servers located in the UK.
Under the deal resellers can assure their customers Shared Hosting as well as Reseller Hosting on server locations are based in the UK.
Bhavin Turakhia, Founder of ResellerClub said hosting meant that website owners can reduce latency and benefit from better local search engine rankings.
Turakhia said that since the UK is one of ResellerClub’s biggest markets and resellers were warning that the content had to be kept local.
Earlier this year another cloud supplier saw a hole in the market and created a cloud platform that could manage the different levels of infrastructure and service required in a highly-secure cloud environment.
The company pointed out that “there’s a lot of concern around data security, particularly in Europe where there’s a great deal of anxiety about the Patriot Act, we felt that increasing our focus on security could offer an interesting and important opportunity for us,” a company spokesman said.
One of the company’s selling points is that its customers know and can control where their data is based and where that data is being accessed from.
It can be expected that as the EU looks closer at Data Protection then more such regional cloud packages will be required.
