The cloud in Europe - everything's fine!
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

Abstract

Even though it’s scarcely new any more, there’s still plenty of caution about moving to the cloud. But the people holding back – and those saying “go for it” – are not always the ones you might expect.

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Even though it’s scarcely new any more, there’s still plenty of caution about moving to the cloud. But the people holding back – and those saying “go for it” – are not always the ones you might expect.

It’s almost 3 years since Gartner announced that cloud computing had reached the top of its hype cycle (LiveWire comment from Jennifer Smith here). So you’d think it would be well through its “trough of disillusionment” by now.

But according to Gartner again, cloud adoption in Europe will trail that in the United States by at least 2 years – not just because of the euro crisis but also because of its current multi-country business processes and tougher privacy rules. And other inhibitors seem to linger as well.

A recent survey by communications company Alcatel-Lucent found that two thirds of IT decision makers didn’t use the cloud for their essential business applications for fear of service outages. Almost half found current system delays unacceptable, and a quarter complained that there was no simple resolution path when service level agreements weren’t met.

On the plus side, almost half were confident that these issues would be resolved and expected to expand their use of cloud services over the coming 3 years. But the fact that technological issues still loom large is disappointing, given that the cloud is hardly new.

Meanwhile, the privacy issues haven’t gone away either. Google is scarcely squeaky clean in the eyes of privacy regulators (LiveWire comment here) – but it has recently attempted to set its house in order by announcing a set of model contract clauses for businesses that use Google Apps, to help them comply with the European Data Protection Directive.

However Kathryn Wynn, data protection specialist at the law firm Pinsent Masons, maintains that it’s very difficult to put valid model clauses in place in the cloud. They’d need to detail each jurisdiction in which the data could be hosted, and any incorrect implementation could mean that European “adequacy” rules would not be met.

But the European Commission’s acting deputy director general of Information Society & Media, Megan Richards, seems to be taking a surprisingly upbeat approach. Following a speech at the recent Cloud Computing World Forum in London, she told the Register newsletter that it shouldn’t matter where the data was stored as long as European rules applied.

Legislation to implement those rules was currently going through the European Parliament and should be ready in the next two and a half years, she said. It would certainly fit Gartner’s estimate of the likely delay – but, given European institutions’ current record on getting things done, you have to wonder whether Richards is suffering from a nasty bout of eurocrat’s optimism.

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