Cloud Privacy By Design – Ontario’s Opportunity to Lead the World

The EU has re-energized the big policy momentum of the Cloud industry, with their recent announcement European Commissioner Releases Cloud Strategy, to:

“Unleashing the potential of cloud computing in Europe” outlines actions to deliver a net gain of 2.5 million new European jobs, and an annual boost of EUR 160 billion to EU GDP (around 1%), by 2020.”

The scale of the global opportunity that Cloud Computing represents is evident from these big steps to move it forward, and which highlight one particular dimension is uniquely powerful for Ontario ventures in this space.

EU Data Privacy – Cloud Best Practices

This news follows their recent moves to unify the legal mechanisms for how Cloud Privacy matters are handled, as reported in this news article.

Indeed within these plans, as described in this Cloud Security Alliance report EU data protection regulations (29-page PDF), it stipulates requirements that directly refer to Cloud Privacy By Design:

It would also require companies to conduct privacy impact assessments, to implement “Privacy by Design” rules, and to ensure “Privacy by Default” in their application. Individuals would have greater rights, such as the “Right to be Forgotten” and the “Right to Data Portability.”

These are very much the cutting areas of Cloud Computing, and so not only is their local expertize but actually the ‘brand’ is tremendously well known.

The Privacy By Design phrase is well entrenched as a world-wide best practice, and so products that are based on this expertize would be to use this as a big part of their international expansion and most importantly how they convey the value of their technology.

For example David Canellos, CEO of Perspecsys, was quoted in this GigaOM coverage of the news.