Huawei gets EU ePrivacy for FusionInsight Freeimages.com/Vince Varga
Huawei gets EU ePrivacy for FusionInsight

In a brief press release Huawei has announced that Huawei FusionInsight has been awarded an “ePrivacy Seal” from ePrivacy for compliance with both EU and German data protection laws and regulations. FusionInsight is Huawei’s Hadoop based enterprise grade DaaS (Data-as-a-Service) platform. With the announcement of the ePrivacy Seal they will no doubt hope to convince European companies of the legitimacy of the product for use in Europe.

As of writing Huawei have not yet been listed on the ePrivacy website. When listed they will be joining a number of other companies in achieving the ePrivacy Seal EU Version including Adjust, Krux digital, Criteo SA, Semasio GmbH, Applift GmbH, Opera Mediaworks Gmbh and Rocket Fuel. Achieving this is not a simple task and it took Huawei four months to complete the legal and technical evaluations.

There are five phases required to complete the certification:

  1. Requirements gathering: Includes the identification of the products and processes requiring the certification and the scope of data privacy and communities affected.
  2. Analysis: Technical and legal evaluation of the products and processes, identifying the gaps that need to be bridged to reach the certification levels
  3. Optimisation: This phase is where the vendor, in this case Huawei, optimises the product and processes to achieve certification
  4. Testing: An audit of the products and processes as well as legal due diligence to ensure that the vendor reaches the acceptable levels for certification. Where shortfalls are identified remediation work by the vendor needs to be carried out before certification is recommended
  5. Sealing: The actual certification process itself, one assumes that this includes updating the ePrivacy site and this has not yet been completed.

The FusionInsight platform gives Enterprises a platform for mass data storage, query, and analytics to scale their Big Data requirements rapidly. With an open architecture FusionInsight can run on standard x86 servers. This latest announcement will give enterprises the surety that the platform can meet data protection requirements within the EU, including Germany which has the tightest regulation.

Aimed at the Financial and Mobile industry FusionInsight includes technology for authentication and authorization, secure transmission, generalization, data encryption, and flexible use of data security and privacy protection policies. The solution meets the legislative and technical privacy requirements of more than 100 countries and the ePrivacy Seal proves this point within the EU. It will allows carriers and financial institutions a level of assurance that the Huawei solution will meet their national requirements from an independent source.

Conclusion

In looking at the ePrivacy Seals already awarded it is interesting that most of the other providers are mobile marketing platforms. IBM, Microsoft and Amazon have not undertaken the certification. This raises the question of how valid the certification is to the target audience. While companies will announce that their solutions are compliant with legislation there are few organisations that actually validate that this is the case.

With the arrival of the European General Data Protection Regulation and many EU countries currently adding to their own data protection and privacy legislation, companies need to revisit their approach to compliance and governance. The easiest way for many of them to achieve this is through the use of approved and using products that have been certified to meet the requisite compliance laws. ePrivacy delivers the latter and the fact Huawei has chosen them to certify their compliance is a big win for the company. It will be interesting to see if others follow during 2016.

For Huawei the ePrivacy Seal is a stamp of legitimacy in a market that is competitive. If it delivers a competitive advantage by achieving this and also reduces the negativity often associated with being a non European company operating in Europe it will have been an exercise worth undertaking.

The language used in the press releases indicated that FusionInsight, or at least this certification is aimed more at Carriers than the financial industry as the following statement indicates: “As the unified authentication center, the DaaS provides a Mobile Connect service to authenticate carrier-developed and third-party applications, which ensures carrier-class data security for users.” It should also help in the financial industry as well with companies equally concerned about data protection and privacy laws.

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