by Angela Guess
Brid-Aine Parnell of The Register reports, “A European Commission director has said that it shouldn’t really matter where Europe’s data is stored, as long as it’s secure and protected. Megan Richards, acting deputy director general of Information Society and Media and also part of the Converged Networks and Services directorate, said it wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if European data was held in data centres in the US. ‘Theoretically, it shouldn’t matter where data is held as long as our rules apply,’ Richards toldThe Reg at the Cloud Computing World Forum in London. ‘The legislation in the US is not so different from the legislation we have in the EU’.”
Parnell continues, “Richards was talking about the new data protection legislation currently making its way through the European Parliament, which she is hoping to see implemented in the next two-and-a-half years. ‘It usually takes a year to go through Parliament, usually,’ she emphasised, ‘Then, after adoption, it’s supposed to come in in two years.’ The new data protection legislation is important to the European Cloud Computing Strategy because it will mean that all member states have the same rules instead of the current situation, where each country has adapted the less-binding directive in their own way.”
