Safe Harbor's ending makes for a good start for Cloud28+
After two months of beta testing, European enterprise app and service store Cloud28+ is open for business, making it easier for companies wanting to host their applications or data in Europe to find a home for them.
A beta test is usually a shakedown, intended to remove any lingering bugs, but for Cloud28+ it was more of a shake-up.
The Cloud28+ catalog offers European businesses around 700 infrastructure-, platform- and software-as-a-service offerings from almost 150 partners. It allows them to choose services based on price, performance, and the location where the data is hosted, among other criteria.
Barely a week after the beta test began, the first shock came, as data sovereignty and hosting location unexpectedly took on new importance for many European cloud services businesses. The European Union's top court, asked to clarify a point of law in a case concerning Facebook in Ireland, struck down the Safe Harbor Agreement that had previously allowed businesses to export EU citizens' personal data -- that of their customers or employees, for instance -- to the U.S. for processing. Those that weren't scrambling to make new arrangements were left wondering whether they complied with EU data protection law, which requires that personal data be afforded the same level of privacy protection wherever it is processed.
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