Cloud security vendor Skyhigh Networks has opened a new data centre in Germany as it moves to strengthen its support of European customers and multi-nationals.

The Frankfurt facility is a response to increasing demand for data localisation within Europe, which has been stoked by the recent Safe Harbour ruling by the European Court of Justices.

In October BCN reported how a Court of Justice of the European Union (CREU) ruling puts many companies at risk of prosecution by European privacy regulators if they transfer the data of EU citizen’s to the US without a demonstrable set of privacy safeguards.

The 4,000 firms that transfer their clients’ personal data to the United States currently have no means of demonstrating compliance to EC privacy regulations. As the legal situation currently stands, EU data protection law says companies cannot transfer EU citizens’ personal data to countries outside the EU which have insufficient privacy safeguards.

The new data centre will use a Hadoop cluster to analyse traffic analysis and identify and report on the risk of cloud services. It will provide interception, inspection, encryption and decryption services. The system will also run anomaly detection, reporting and data leak prevention services to secure SkyHigh’s clients’ cloud services.

SkyHigh said the new data centre gives customers a choice over where their data is processed and better performance in addition to privacy and sovereignty. The data centre is on a site owned and managed by European employees.

“We are delighted that Skyhigh Networks has opened a data centre in Europe,” said David Cahill, Security Strategy and Architecture Manager at AIB, a bank with 2.6 million customers and 14,000 employees. Cahill said that conforming to existing European data protection laws and the General Data Protection Regulation expected in 2016 need to be taken “very seriously”.