Why U.S. Tech Giants Spend Billions To Protect Europe Data

As technology advances, tech giant companies also try to advance their products and services to supply the needs of its growing market, and the battle in the cloud computing market is not an exception.

One big example is the move taken by Microsoft of investing over $3 billion (USD) across Europe. Microsoft also shared that they will also be delivering the Microsoft Cloud from datacenters in France starting 2017.

"We continue to invest heavily in cloud infrastructure to meet the growing demand from European customers and partners," said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft, in a report from Cloud Tweaks.

In addition, Nadella also said that they are building on a global, trusted, intelligent cloud platform, which is core to their mission of empowering every person and organization on the planet to achieve more.

"There's never been a better time for organizations across Europe to seize new growth and opportunity with the Microsoft Cloud," Nadella added.

Furthermore, The New York Times reported that Amazon Web Services also announced that they would be opening multiple data centers in France and Britain soon, while Google is expected to finish and open its multimillion-dollar data complex in the Netherlands by the end of the year.

However, as the market increases, tech giants are very careful in dealing with the European data, and in fact, they are spending billions of dollars just to keep it there. Well, one of the things that probably forced them to keep data in of Europeans is their data privacy law.

"Countries like Germany are well aware of data privacy, and it has made them more wary of where data is kept. Local data sovereignty has become important, and American companies are now aware of that," said Gregor Petri, a cloud computing analyst at the technology research firm Gartner in Veghel, the Netherlands, The New York Times reported.

The new European data privacy law prescribed that it is not the data controller alone that is responsible for the data of a person, but also those companies or individuals that processes the said data will also be held responsible for its protection, including third parties such as cloud providers. Thus, any person or company who deals with the data, wherever they are based, is responsible in the case of a data breach.

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