Monitoring data flows across the European Union’s territory is of strategic importance to inform EU decision-making, investment choices in the area of cloud computing and to assess the competitiveness of the European digital economy. Therefore, the European Commission is launching an anonymised survey to get an overview about such data flows.

The Directorate-General Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG CONNECT) is currently working on setting up the European Data Flow Monitoring initiative to map data flows across the European Union (EU).

In this context, DG CONNECT, in collaboration with the Joint Research Centre, is launching a voluntary survey for companies and public entities to gather aggregated and anonymised data on:

  • The amount of data stored within cloud infrastructures by companies and public entities within the EU (i.e. data stocks) and;
  • Data moved from one cloud infrastructure to another across the EU (i.e. data flows).

The gathered data from the survey will then be used for the development of a publicly available aggregated European mapping of current data stocks and flows across the EU territory as of 2019 for the preliminary mapping and as of 2020 for final mapping.

Companies and public entities are encouraged to give their input to the survey until 15 October 2019.

Full survey

Source and photo credits: European Commission