ISO 27018 And Personal Information In The Cloud: First Year Scorecard

Getting on for a year after it was published, ISO 27018 – the first international standard focusing on the protection of personal data in the public cloud – continues, unobtrusively and out of the spotlight, to move centre stage as the battle for Cloud pre-eminence hots up.

At the highest level, this is a competitive field for those with the longest investment horizons and the deepest pockets – think million square foot data centres with 100,000+ servers using enough energy to power a city. According to research firm Synergy, the Cloud infrastructure services market – Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas), Platform as a Services (PaaS) and Private and Hybrid Cloud – was worth $16bn in 2014, up 50% on 2013, and is predicted to grow 30% to over $21bn in 2015. Synergy estimated that the four largest players accounted for 50% of this market, with Amazon at 28%, Microsoft at 11%, IBM at 7% and Google at 5%. Of these, Microsoft's 2014 revenues almost doubled over 2013, whilst