Brexit: Now What? What Your Company Needs to Know

It’s unclear how the British exit from the EU will affect the global economy, but this eWEEK slide show suggests five things for organizations to think about.

Tech companies with offices in the United Kingdom might have trouble finding and hiring enough skilled engineers and developers. Without the EU allowing workers to move freely between countries, companies are now worried about a shortage of qualified employees. This may intensify until post-Brexit regulatory implications are better understood.

British entrepreneurs face the potential loss of EU business and research grants. London’s technology industry has been on the rise for the past several years partly because Britain benefits in large part from funds such as the European Innovation Fund. If that dries up, it sets the tech industry back. It goes the other way too—about 50 percent of all European funding comes from venture firms based in London.

A new EU-UK trade deal is expected to take years before an agreement is reached, with the Leave campaign saying it wants a new deal to be in place by 2020. Until a new deal is finalized, a UK-based company outside of Europe would trade with the EU under World Trade Organization rules, which would see UK exporters paying new EU import tariffs and more.

When the United Kingdom is part of the EU, it operates under the same data sovereignty laws as other countries in the EU. Now, companies operating in Europe may have to manage one set of data privacy laws for the UK and another for EU countries. There’s also the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)—will these standards change as well? These changing regulations may affect both cloud and managed service providers, who may need to offer additional options for customers to host data across Europe, and enterprise end users, who may need to reconsider where their data is stored in Europe.

Companies must have flexibility in cloud options and the ability to adapt to comply with data sovereignty laws. It is unclear how data storage and data privacy regulations will shake out. Major IT projects can’t just be put on hold. SugarCRM is advising its European customers to work with vendors that operate their own cloud and also enable other service providers to deliver SaaS services on their clouds, either private or public. “Future-proofing” deployments with private clouds that can withstand current regulatory uncertainty is a good option. Embrace multiple cloud deployment options and be able to “run” in different data regimes, complying with different data protection and privacy laws—this is what will be key as post-Brexit regulations are finalized.