Brussels, 21/06/2018 – New Regulation prohibits data localisation restrictions and is a major step forward to data portability in Europe and will help prevent our clients — including public administrations — becoming ‘locked-in’ to proprietary services.
“We really like this Regulation” says Alban Schmutz, Chairman of CISPE (Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe) and VP Strategic Development & Public Affairs of OVH. “Preventing localisation barriers in Europe will help cloud providers delivering cloud services at scale faster and cheaper, especially for the public sector. Encouraging data portability through industry codes of conducts will also help cloud customers — including public administrations — avoid ‘lock-in’ situations.”
“Our members are using more and more cloud infrastructure services,” adds Freddy Van den Wyngaert, General Secretary of EuroCIO, a non-for-profit European CIO Association with more than 1.000 members (CIOs) across Europe. “Having clear rules will help us to select providers as well as accelerating the free flow of data in Europe.”
In anticipation of the Regulation, Alban Schmutz (CISPE) and Freddy Van den Wyngaert (EuroCIO) already started working with industry stakeholders, cloud customers and the European Commission to develop an industry Code of Conduct for Data Portability and Cloud Services Switching for Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) and already opened a Request for Comments (see http://cloudswitching.eu),. “We truly believe that this Code of Conduct will pave the way towards real implementation of the Article 6 on Data Portability of the “Free Flow of non-personal Data Regulation”, says Van den Wyngaert.
“After this major Regulation, the next step will be for the European Commission to set up a framework for Cloud First Public Procurement Policy” comments Schmutz.