Mexico City, May 7, 2014. –
As part of the Government Leaders Forum – Latin America and the Caribbean, an event organized by Microsoft that brings together the most influential leaders in the region to exchange ideas about the opportunities technology offers, Microsoft announced the whitepaper “Facilitando the Cloud: Data Protection Regulation as a Driver of National Competitiveness for Latin America,” which describes a framework of policies that would maximize the opportunities cloud computing offers governments and communities in the region.
The article, published by the Inter-American Law Review and written by Horacio Gutiérrez, Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at Microsoft, and Daniel Korn, Director of Corporate Affairs at Microsoft Latin America, presents in this forum the benefits that countries can leverage for their national competitiveness at a time when many countries around the world are evaluating the need to update their data protection laws to enable personal decision making, maintain information security and build trust around a new technology that could potentially transform society.
“The decisions relating to the regulatory framework that facilitate cloud computing could become an engine for economic growth and help extend social benefits in the region. It is important to mention that cloud computing not only increases efficiency, but it also increases equality,” said Hernán Rincón, President of Microsoft Latin America, adding that “the link between technology and its economic benefits happens through trust.”
In 2014 in Latin America, cloud-computing related jobs are expected to grow by 34 percent. The cloud should also be of special interest for small and medium-sized businesses that employ 67 percent of the workforce in Latin America. Small and medium-sized businesses, in many cases, have not yet taken advantage of this powerful computing solution. The cloud opens up a positive environment for the creation of new jobs and cost savings for their businesses.
The article also states that social inclusion, agility, flexibility and security are some of the benefits that are positively impacted when there’s a balanced regulatory framework that facilitates the cloud. For example, the cloud enables a rural hospital to have long-distance access to specialists in real time, or when institutions and companies can simply adapt during peak demand periods for their services, in times of crisis for example. This flexibility also stems from the fact the cloud is mobile and, as such, is widely accessible in a broad, continuous and secure way. Furthermore, a study of 70,000 security breaches recorded among 1,600 companies found that the computing systems used on-site were more vulnerable to attack than those apps stored in the cloud.
A balanced regulation facilitates the benefits of cloud computing and drives national competitiveness when it promotes data security, protects consumer privacy, promotes transparency and builds trust in the cloud.
For the cloud to be successful, individual users must have the certainty that their data is safe from computer hackers, and that they are able to control who can access their personal information. Clients want transparency and they want to have a better understanding about what personal data is being collected and how it is being used.
Microsoft is committed to remaining the industry leader in terms of cloud privacy.
“Looking back someday, it will be said that those data-protection frameworks that facilitated cloud computing were the ones which best served a country’s aspirations for ‘national competitiveness,’ i.e., the economic growth and long-term improvement of a society’s standard of living resulting from improvements in national productivity and efficiency,” said Korn.
The full article is available here: http://inter-american-law-review.law.miami.edu/facilitando-cloud-data-protection-regulation-driver-national-competitiveness-latin-america/
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