Europe calls for global data protection law to ensure cloud computing security

According to foreign media reports, European leaders called for a global agreement on data protection to address cloud computing's data security vulnerabilities. The appeal came on Friday (March 26) to 300 Internet legal experts from many countries who met in the European Parliament to discuss the harmonization of cyber-crime laws. Francesco Pizetti, head of the Italian Data Protection authority, warns that cloud computing challenges the legal basis for which personal data should be handled by companies. Without a strict national rule that is acceptable to all the countries of the world, it is impossible to continue to protect the data of citizens. The Executive Director of the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA), Udo Helmbrecht, said the agency was reviewing cloud computing because of the risk of data security in cloud computing. ENISA will push European regulators to ask cloud-computing providers to inform customers about a security breach. ' We need to build trust in the cloud, ' says Helmbrecht. If we do not build trust in this environment, this business model will not work. The executive director of the Cloud Computing Security Alliance, Jim Reavis, says the management environment needs to clarify questions for cloud computing providers. One uncertainty is how to handle requests from Governments to access the data they own. Cloud-computing providers should make it difficult for "hostile" governments to get their data, but governments with legal rights should be supported in making such requests. ' We don't have a lot of good rules and structures to do this, ' says Reavis. There are many things that need to be dealt with by the legal profession. There are many event responses to deal with. We need to encrypt many cloud computing technologies. Cloud computing is challenging the definition of privacy, Yves Poullet, director of the IT and Legal Research Center at Namur University (University of Namur). Foreign police may capture data stored in cloud computing data centers hosted in their countries. Italy's Pizetti says the EU wants better cloud-computing rules caused by the U.S. seizure of European bank data hosted by the Global Bank's Financial Telecommunications Association. The move closed the company's data center in the United States. He said the European Parliament's Congress on cybercrime could help create an international regulatory system that would make cloud computing safer. Alexander Seger, head of the European Parliament's economic crime department, warned that European companies should not use the cloud-computing providers of their hosted data centers in countries without adequate legal protection.