Planeetta Internet, a Helsinki-based hosting firm, tells they’ve launched the Jelastic cloud platform in Finland, which might be interesting to some local startups. Jellastic is a similar platform to Heroku, except it claims to be easier in some ways to set up. Users only need to copy-paste their code, with out any complicated installations, taking the hard stuff away. And like most other hosting solutions, their solution is designed to scale up your startup, however you need it.
I sat down with Lauri Kasti, the CEO of Planeetta, who told us about some additional benefits.All of Jelastic service providers are local, so they operate within local laws. EU law regarding data protection can be tricky – they strongly protect an individual’s right to privacy, which add layers of complication for businesses working with indiviuals’ data.
In the Data Protection Directive, personal data very broadly as: “any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (“data subject”); an identifiable person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identification number or to one or more factors specific to his physical, physiological, mental, economic, cultural or social identity;” – which is nearly any data involving an individual.
European startups should also be aware that the directive requires that no personal data pass EU borders unless you can be and adequate level of protection – which could potentially mean trouble if you’re just throwing customer data up into Google Docs or Dropbox. And rather than the service provider being liable for misuse of customer data, the company with the data is always responsible.
In all, it looks like an interesting solution for Finnish startups. You get the scalability mixed with the assurance that you won’t have to deal with penalties due to accidental misuse of data.
