In the wake of the PRISM surveillance revelations, Neelie Kroes, the EU Digital Agenda Commissioner, met with the European Cloud Partnership in Early July. Ms. Kroes appealed to the EU legislative bodies to speed up adopting the draft Cyber Security Directive (covered in previous posts and available here). The Commissioner stressed the importance of cloud computing for the EU market as a means of delivering more integrated, effective and efficient services. She lamented that for the time being, the national divergences of data protection rules still stand in the way of a “European cloud”. Ms. Kroes called for speedy harmonization of European standards on network and information security, to ensure that European citizens and companies alike can enjoy the benefits of a trustworthy and secure cloud. The Commissioner’s appeal derives all the more force from the recent revelations about data surveillance on a huge scale within the NSA’s secret PRISM project.
