A frequent concern I hear is that there are risks attached to running cloud services because many are physically located outside the EU and that in any event, data protection legislation renders the use of them inadvisable at best. It is actually something of a grey area because providers could always offer ‘safe harbor’ statements. Regardless – that’s just been put to bed (mostly) with the announcement that Amazon Web Services has opened up a new data center facility in London. From the blurbs which the NextWeb kindly reprinted:
AWS Direct Connect helps businesses establish a dedicated network connection from their premises or data center to AWS, with UK firms now able to link in directly to AWS EU West Region in Dublin via Telecity Sovereign House in London.
It may not always be obvious but many of the services with which you may be interacting also use AWS. In the past it has never been entirely clear where your data was held and even now you might want to think about a spot of due diligence to ensure that it remains within the EU rather than being bounced in and out of other AWS data centers. With this announcement, you can now ask that all important question: Are you contracting with AWS EU West Region? If the answer is yes, then it is highly likely that you will be compliant since there are economic and operational reasons for keeping the data that goes via Telecity inside the UK and Ireland.
Another naysayer argument booted into touch. Thank goodness.
PS – that makes me happy as I am an AWS user
