So, the Privacy Shield is dead. I’ve never been under the illusion that the US or other third countries provide the same protections as the EU. I am a strong advocate for privacy.

But yet. I am also conflicted. There is one issue here that I never see discussed is that as businesses, particularly small businesses move to the cloud and seek out platforms to work with, they will invariably find that the ones they want to work with are not European and that their customer data will not be held in Europe.

I have struggled with this more and more in the last 12 months, particularly in recent months trying to increase efficiency and resilience.

Small businesses are not going to have the time, resources or expertise to deal with this.

My own conclusion is that the EU itself has to legislate that any company operating within the EU must keep EU data on servers within the EU.

And there there is Brexit to come in a few months.