This week sees Microsoft host the ‘Government Leaders Forum - Latin America and the Caribbean’ event, which is taking place in Mexico City.

As part of the event, Microsoft has revealed a new whitepaper that describes a framework of policies aimed to help maximise the opportunities cloud computing presents to governments and communities in the region.

Facilitando the Cloud: Data Protection Regulation as a Driver of National Competitiveness for Latin America was written by Horacio Gutiérrez, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel at Microsoft, and Daniel Korn, director of corporate affairs at Microsoft Latin America, and published by the Inter-American Law Review.

The whitepaper looks at how countries can benefit from updates to their data protection laws and improve national competitiveness through better decision-making and information security maintenance.

“The decisions relating to the regulatory framework that facilitate cloud computing could become an engine for economic growth and help extend social benefits in the region. It is important to mention that cloud computing not only increases efficiency, but it also increases equality,” said Hernán Rincón, president of Microsoft Latin America. “The link between technology and its economic benefits happens through trust.”

Many small and medium-sized businesses in the region are yet to take advantage of the cloud, but it is expected that 2014 will see the number of jobs related to cloud computing in Latin America grow by 34%.

According to the report, a balanced regulatory framework which facilitates the cloud can bring benefits such as social inclusion, agility, flexibility and security, as well as driving national competitiveness.

“Looking back someday, it will be said that those data-protection frameworks that facilitated cloud computing were the ones which best served a country’s aspirations for ‘national competitiveness,’ i.e., the economic growth and long-term improvement of a society’s standard of living resulting from improvements in national productivity and efficiency,” concluded Daniel Korn.

The full report can be found on the Inter-American Law Review website.

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