Huawei urges governments to put more effort into cloud data security

CHINESE TELECOMMS VENDOR Huawei has urged governments to become more active with security and privacy laws for cloud systems.

Huawei is a telecommunications infrastructure vendor and is getting into the cloud business through its Singlecloud infrastructure. It told The INQUIRER that it implements industry and legal standards in its setup but urged governments to put more effort into working on data privacy laws. William Dong, president of Huawei's IT solution sales department, enterprise business group told The INQUIRER that it wants to "push organisations and governments to build some kind of standard to make cloud popular".

Dong said that Huawei already followed certain industry and legal standards required for companies to put data on the cloud, including regionalising data so it doesn't leave a particular jurisdiction. However he said that security is "not just a technology issue", adding that a "more reliable way is legal [powers]" and that it is "an issue which needs government effort, not just effort from the vendors".

Mario Fan, head of enterprise business for Western Europe at Huawei said that the firm is already taking an active role in the Distributed Management Task Force and other IT organisations and said that in some cases "governments are more active than vendors". However with the news that the UK government has all but given up on its G-Cloud, perhaps the UK government is putting in less effort than some of its counterparts.

As for the data, Dong said that there should be some form of "legal SLA [Service Level Agreement]". The call to hold cloud vendors to higher account is a refreshing change from many cloud vendors who seem to ply the line of "trust us we're a cloud vendor", one that might not slide by any more with recent high profile data losses at Sony and Sega.

Dong and Fan's comments are in some way trying to urge governments to show greater interest in clouds. After all, if governments can impose strict guidelines on how and where data is stored on the clouds, it might rekindle the public's faith in clouds rather than looking upon them as security and privacy black holes. µ