Powered by Cloud conference.

On February 2nd and 3rd the “Powered By Cloud” conference will be held at the Lewis Media Centre, Millbank, Westminster, London.
I (Lance) have been invited to speak on day two of the event and shall be sharing the stage with some great people ( Speakers List ), specifically I shall be speaking in session 7 Privacy, Regulation, Security and Cloud Computing.

7. Privacy, Regulation, Security and Cloud Computing
How the industry will maintain the integrity of customer information and the role government will play

A simplistic view of cloud computing is that the end result will mean that aspects of a user’s environment will be carried out in less-defined areas of a more global network but that may in turn present issues for governmental authorities. Data protection laws in particular seem impossible to be adjudicated upon within the context of the Cloud. Consider too the laws of the government responsible for the registered office of the cloud computing company, and the laws of the country or countries where their data centers which may well be completely at odds with each other. Privacy and security also represent enormous challenges that will not possibly be clarified for many years to come. In this session we review these critical issues and the scale of the challenge.

The topic is very interesting and we have posted some information on it here previously ( Cloud Computing and the Data Protection Act ). Registration for the event is open, with “early bird” pricing closing this week (Registration Page ).

Here in Europe the matters concerning “The Cloud” and legislation are more of an issue perhaps than for our colleagues in the USA. Countries here are smaller and there are a myriad of borders to be crossed and laws to be considered inside each country and of course more widely within the EU.

Until recently the largest cloud provider (Amazon) did not have services hosted in Europe, which raised issues about data transfer outside the EU. Even with servers in the EU, the national legislation needs to be considered also. The Data Protection Act here in the UK does relate to cloud computing and to such things as data storage at rest and the access to data on a cloud computing process/server.

I have started developing my talk and will cover this sort of topic there. There are some great speakers at the event who deserve to be listened to, some I know personally and some by reputation.

If you are planning on attending, please leave a comment or send an email to say so, perhaps we can meet up?