EU Cybersecurity Label Vote Rescheduled for May

A vote on a draft EU cybersecurity label that would have allowed Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet’s Google to compete for extremely sensitive EU cloud computing contracts has been postponed until May by national cybersecurity experts, according to people with knowledge of the situation on Tuesday.

The European Union wants to introduce a cybersecurity certification scheme (EUCS) to vouch for the cybersecurity of cloud services and help governments and companies pick a secure and trusted vendor for their cloud computing business.

However, disagreements on whether strict requirements should be imposed on Big Tech to qualify for the highest level of the EU cybersecurity label have hampered efforts.

The experts, who met on Monday and Tuesday in Brussels, did not vote on the latest draft of the scheme proposed by the EU cybersecurity agency ENISA in 2020 and tweaked by Belgium, which currently holds the rotating EU presidency, the people said.

After the experts’ vote, the next step is an opinion from EU countries and the final decision by the European Commission.

The latest version scrapped so-called sovereignty requirements from a previous proposal, which obliged U.S. tech giants to set up a joint venture or cooperate with an EU-based company to store and process customer data in the bloc to qualify for the highest level of the EU cybersecurity label.

REUTERS