Following the ruling of the European Court of Justice in July 2020, the Privacy Shield has failed as a legal basis for the transfer of personal data of European citizens to the USA due to insufficient data protection.
Against this background, the question arises to what extent cloud services such as Microsoft® Teams and 365 can be used at all. Prof. Dr. Heckmann has written a legal opinion on this topic. In addition to the reasons for the Schrems II ruling and its implications for the use of public cloud services, the expert opinion also considers the extent to which a technical solution such as R&S®Trusted Gate represents a way out of the current cloud dilemma.
Core contents of the legal opinion:
- General principles of data transfer to third party countries
- Previous legal bases for data transfer to the USA up to the Schrems II ruling
- Future solutions and attempted solutions
- The separation of cloud service (business level) and content data usage (encryption level) as an innovation of R&S®Trusted Gate
- Trustworthiness through data ownership
- R&S®Trusted Gate as a data protection-compliant multi-level system
Prof. Dr. Dirk Heckmann holds the Chair for the Law and Security of Digitalization at the Technical University of Munich. His provided legal opinion clarifies many important questions regarding the privacy-compliant use of cloud solutions such as Microsoft 365 or Teams and also shows a clear way out of the "cloud dilemma" that has arisen after the Schrems II ruling of the European Court of Justice on the subject of data protection.