Ireland’s shambolic data privacy framework will cost the Irish IT industry dearly

Impetus

Microsoft recently announced that it will allow international customers to specify that their cloud data will only be stored in their German data centres run by Deutsche Telekom. There is a huge resistance among European and many Asian companies to any system that involves the transmission of data to the US. Deutsche Telekom has been actively selling secure cloud data storage to US consumers and business for several years.

For obvious reasons.

Countries with serious data protection laws and regulatory management like Germany and Switzerland are the obvious choice for a globally active US company. Austrian law student Max Schrems made a fool of the Irish system of laws and data protection authorities supposedly based over a grocery shop in a provincial town, with a tiny budget and limited staff expertise, by having to bring a case to the European Court of Justice to get the Irish Authorities to deal with his request.

The idea that governments exist to provide a service to their citizens and the public generally seems totally alien to Ireland.

Bochum University has 15 professors in its data security department teaching a variety of bachelors and master’s degrees on IT security topics. Yet they can’t meet the demand to provide enough qualified staff, just for the German market.

Ireland still has no direct fibre connectivity with mainland Europe, aside from the sometimes talked about link between Cork and France. With some planning, the fibre route between Cork and France could be embedded in a combined HVDC power cable system between France and Ireland, linking the electricity grids and providing data transfer at the same time. I doubt if there are many divers working for intelligence agencies prepared to risk a 400,000 volt shock to put a tap on a fibre link. Malta has done this in a link to Sicily which connects the Maltese grid to the Italian grid. Aside from providing a big saving on the cable laying costs, and security for the data, there is no risk of interference between DC electricity running next to data travelling at laser frequencies.

Ireland needs world class impressive data privacy legislation platform, as well as a credible regulatory framework to provide security to its citizens and give the country an international perception as a place where one can keep business and personal information free of data trawling nation states reach, in the absence of an Irish court’s approval to disclose crime related data on specific matters and people.

We also need to see more university courses focussing on computer security in Irish universities.

http://studienangebot.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/en/it-security-networks-and-systems/master-1-subject

http://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/microsoft-unveils-new-data-plan-to-tackle-us-internet-spying-1.2426877

Impetus

Arstechnica.com has published a story on how Microsoft is establishing a "data trustee" under German law to hold cloud data from Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics CRM. The new platform will be beyond the control of Microsoft, even though it is fully integrated and sold as a Microsoft service.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/11/microsoft-is-building-data-centres-in-germany-that-the-us-government-cant-touch/

syklops

I'd rather it was Switzerland tbh. They seem to 'get' security, privacy, and they've never tried to take over the world.