Toxic Cloud Computing, and How Open Source Can Help

Grazed from ComputerWorld UK. Author: Glyn Moody.

There are so many parts to the institutions running the European Union that it’s easy to lose sight of them all and their varied activities. For example, one of the lesser-known European Parliament bodies is the Directorate-General for Internal Policies. You might expect the studies that it commissions to be deadly dull, but some turn out to be not just highly interesting but hugely important.

One such is the new report "Fighting cyber crime and protecting privacy in the cloud" [.pdf]. Here’s the basic background:

While cloud computing is not a new technology per se and has been developed and marketed primarily for profit-driven purposes, the growing reliance on its infrastructures and services poses a series of challenges for EU strategies and policies. This study addresses these challenges, examining the current EU framework in the field and highlighting the legal aspects in relation to the right to data protection, the issue of jurisdiction, responsibility and the regulation of data transfers to third countries…

As you can see, rather than being yet another vacuous load of nonsense about the currently fashionable "cybercrime" area, whatever that is, this latest study concerns the undeniably important cloud computing approach, and how it impacts data protection. This emphasises something that I mentioned last week: that data protection promises to be one of the really key areas for 2013…

Read more from the source @ http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2013/01/how-open-source-can-de-toxify-cloud-computing/index.htm