British, French and German employees trust European Union countries to store their data far more than those nations outside the EU, according to new research.
Blue Coat Systems polled over 3000 workers in various industries in the three countries and found 46% would trust an EU country with their corporate data, versus 18% who would trust a non-EU country like the US.
Some 36% claimed they’d trust no particular country to store or host their data in the cloud.
Younger staff members are more trusting of EU countries, with 55% of 18-24 year-olds happy for their firm to use European datacenters, but employees aged 55+ trust EU countries the least (36%).
Perhaps unsurprisingly given revelations about NSA snooping and the recent European Court of Justice ruling on Safe Harbor, just 9% of respondents said they’d trust their data to be stored in the US – although this figure rose to 13% for British employees.
The findings are significant given the coming EU Referendum to be held in the UK on Thursday.
Security experts have warned repeatedly that the UK could be forced into protracted talks with EU negotiators in the event of a Brexit vote, in order to ensure the free flow of data between the two.
In the meantime, major tech companies could start moving ‘European’ data out of UK facilities – severely impacting the digital economy, it is also claimed.
Interestingly, as it stands, more UK respondents to the survey would trust EU countries to store their corporate data (40%) than the United Kingdom (38%).
The forthcoming European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will finally land in May 2018, will make the EU arguably the most advanced region on the planet in terms of how it regulates and enforces data protection and privacy issues.
In fact, even if the UK leaves the EU, it will still have to enforce similar regulations to the GDPR in order to ensure data can be legally transported between the two, experts claimed at Infosecurity Europe 2016 earlier this month.