What is Safe Harbor? It is the policy agreement established between the United States Department of Commerce and the European Union (E.U.) in November 2000 to regulate the way that U.S. companies export and handle the personal data (such as names and addresses) of European citizens.
Earlier this month, Court of Justice of the European Union declared that the US Safe Harbor is invalid, directly affecting the European companies that use services of public cloud vendors. It was an eye opener for other geographies as well.
Recently there have been shocking instances of data leakage and data breaches – particularly Edward Snowden’s revelation about a surveillance scheme operated by the National Security Agency (NSA) called PRISM. Following these, the authorities and regulators across the world are strengthening laws for Data Sovereignty, Data Residency and Data Privacy – the ones like Safe Harbor.
Broadly, there are three concerns:
- Protection of citizen’s personal information
- Protecting the interest of local businesses and, last but not the least
- National security
During the whole process of managing these concerns, authorities and regulators work on amending and strengthening the laws – which may sometime be unclear, inconsistent and often subject to interpretation. Hence, Information Technology leaders (CIO/CISO) are required to work closely (and continuously) with their compliance and legal teams to understand these regulations, as their impact may be severe on the business.
We expect that for companies to comply with these laws and guidelines, particularly in security-conscious and regulated industries, the IT leaders will play safe and would prefer on-premise and private cloud solutions. Such solutions provide IT with complete control on how it is deployed and managed.
At Vaultize, we have always been sensitive to security, privacy and regulations. This is what makes us a popular vendor in highly regulated and security conscious industries like Banks, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) providing end-to-end enterprise file security – but without compromising end-user experience. World-wide, many large enterprises, including Fortune companies, take advantage of Vaultize’s enterprise file security capabilities that help them comply with laws - including on-premise/private cloud deployment, unmatched encryption, ability to control encryption keys and enterprise digital rights management (E-DRM). You may find the post titled Safe Harbor, Privacy and Sovereignty Elements in Enterprise File Sharing interesting.
Vaultize’s on-premise/private cloud deployment provides following benefits:
- Works on existing infrastructure as a single server or a scalable private cloud
- Complete control over configurability and availability
- Meets regulatory compliance for firms that cannot use public cloud
- Deployment from a basic single server environment to a highly scalable and reliable private cloud environment
- Works on servers powered by OpenStack, Citrix, VMware, CloudStack, etc.
- Supports complex SAN- or NAS-based storage and cloud storage (including Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure and Rackspace Cloud Files)
- Highly available configuration
- Single server supports up to a few thousand users
- Multi-server configuration scalable to hundreds of thousands of users
