E.U. - U.S. Safe Harbor Ruling Makes Cloud an Attractive Choice for Managing Global Customer Data

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwired - October 13, 2015) - In light of the ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union on October 6th that the 15-year-old Safe Harbor framework is invalid, Gigya, the Leader in Customer Identity Management, has pointed to the cloud as the solution to ensure compliance with evolving data and privacy regulations across international borders.

Rendered by Europe's highest court, the Safe Harbor ruling is an effort to fortify consumer privacy by protecting the data of E.U. residents from potential access by U.S. authorities. For years, U.S. companies were able to transfer the personal data of E.U.-based consumers back to data centers in the United States, following one unified set of privacy standards.

Safe Harbor's invalidation means the 28 countries in the European Union will have individual oversight regarding how companies collect and manage their respective citizens' data. There is potential for greater restriction on the transfer and use of E.U. citizens' personal data, including the possibility of data storage localization requirements, which could create barriers that would inhibit U.S. firms' respective overseas businesses.

The Court of Justice's ruling follows similar announcements and is in line with the worldwide trend of data localization. For example, Russia requires data about Russian users to be stored within the country's borders.

Due to the fact that global organizations are now required to manage their users' data in multiple geographies and support unique scenarios like users moving from one region to another, on-premises storage of consumer data is either not feasible or incredibly expensive from a hardware, OPEX and legal perspective. Cloud-based technology opens up the ability for select customer identity management vendors to provide geographically dispersed data management that is economical, scalable and flexible enough to adapt to evolving data and privacy mandates.

"Privacy is a growing concern in the digital age, and it's increasingly evident that on-premises customer identity data management isn't accommodating or cost-effective enough to support today's ever-changing privacy regulations. In fact, it may even stifle a consumer-facing enterprise's ability to conduct business globally," said Patrick Salyer, CEO of Gigya. "In our experience managing multiple data centers around the globe and offering E.U.-based consumer data management capabilities, we've identified the cloud as the one technological innovation that can help companies work within the evolving privacy rules and regulations expected to be set forth by countries in the E.U."

About Gigya

Gigya's Customer Identity Management Platform helps companies build better customer relationships by turning unknown site visitors into known, loyal and engaged customers. With Gigya's technology, businesses increase registrations and identify customers across devices, consolidate data into rich customer profiles and provide better service, products and experiences by integrating data into marketing and service applications.

Gigya's platform was designed from the ground up for social identities, mobile devices, consumer privacy and modern marketing. Gigya provides developers with the APIs they need to easily build and maintain secure and scalable registration, authentication, profile management, data analytics and third-party integrations.

More than 700 of the world's leading businesses such as Fox, Forbes and Verizon rely on Gigya to build identity-driven relationships and to provide scalable, secure Customer Identity Management. Headquartered in Mountain View, CA, Gigya is privately held and has raised more than $100m in capital from several leading venture capital firms including Benchmark Capital, Mayfield, Intel Capital, Adobe Ventures and Stanford University.