As we near closer to the vote on Brexit, Blue Coat have today revealed findings from a YouGov survey into workers’ levels of trust in nation states inside and outside the EU when storing data in cloud services such as Gmail, Dropbox and Box.
46% of workers polled across the UK, France and Germany would trust an EU country with their work data, compared to 18% who would trust a non-EU country.
Almost twice as many workers in Great Britain would trust EU countries to host their data (40%), when compared to those from outside of the EU (22%).
Interestingly due to various arguments surrounding Brexit, the number of British respondents saying they would trust an EU state (40%) was higher than those who would trust the United Kingdom (38%), when it comes to storing their data in the cloud.
When it comes to who Brits trust most with their data, Germany and Sweden both received the lion’s share of trust (18%). However, the UK’s trust in Germany was not reciprocated, with German respondents indicating the lowest level of trust in both Great Britain (7%) and Spain (3%).
Overall findings saw Germany perceived to be the most trusting EU nation in which data to reside (26%). At the other end of the spectrum, the EU country which ranked lowest was Spain with only 6% of respondents saying they would trust their data to be stored there.
The survey also revealed a distrust of the USA, with the majority of EU workers polled not trusting the US to store or host their data, indicating that the decisions of the European Court of Justice to strike down the Safe Harbour agreement is supported by European citizens.
Only 9% of respondents would trust their work data to be stored or hosted in the USA. The UK was found to be the most trusting of the US with 13%, while the levels of trust in the US dropped to just 3% among German respondents.
Outside the EU, the smallest proportion would trust China (1%), with South Africa (2%), Russia (2%) and Brazil (2%) also only trusted by a minority of respondents.
Robert Arandjelovic, director of product marketing EMEA, Blue Coat Systems: "The EU regulatory landscape is set to radically change with the introduction of the GDPR legislation and this research highlights the level of distrust in countries outside the EU. Respondents prefer to keep their data within the EU, supporting new European data protection legislation.
"More concerning is the fact that almost half of respondents would trust any country to store their data, indicating too many employees simply don’t pay enough attention to where their work data is held. This presents a risk to enterprises, even if their employees treat where it is being hosted with little interest."
