From Europe’s efforts to create regulations for data localization to worries over the protection of the cloud, the leaks of the past eight months have cast a shadow over cloud providers.

RSA CONFERENCE — San Francisco — Last summer’s revelations of the level to which the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) collected data on American and foreign targets has caused rifts between global businesses which are hindering efforts to secure the cloud, said Richard Clarke, CEO of fine Harbor and a former US cyberczar, on the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) Summit on Monday.

The steady leak of documents up to now eight months detailing the operations of the NSA intelligence collection activities has damaged both US policy efforts abroad and the business of plenty of multinational companies, especially cloud providers. Efforts to implement strong security guidelines for the cloud should overcome efforts by other nations to implement data residency restrictions to hinder competition, Clarke said.

[For more from RSA, see RSA Conference 2014: Complete Coverage.]

“Non-US companies are using the NSA revelations as a marketing tool,” he said. “There’s a good deal of hypocrisy in all of this. Everyone is suddenly amazed that intelligence agencies were collecting intelligence.”

Requirements to force cloud providers to maintain data within the country of origin and never allow data to transit throughout the US amount to technological nationalism and, worse, don’t make the info any appreciably safer, Clarke said. Data hosting in Europe could be just as easy to get access to as data hosted inside the US or another country, Clarke said.

Read the remainder of this story on Dark Reading.

Robert Lemos is a veteran technology journalist of greater than 16 years and a former research engineer, writing articles that experience appeared in Business Week, CIO Magazine, CNET News.com, Computing Japan, CSO Magazine, Dark Reading, eWEEK, InfoWorld, MIT’s Technology Review, … View Full Bio

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