Industry relief over ‘no’ success

industry relief over 'no' successThe direct marketing industry is waking up this morning with a huge collective sigh of relief following the result of the Scottish independence referendum, after the “no” success.
The result – predicted last week by an Equimedia data analysis – removes the potential headache which a “yes” vote would have caused, as organisations with data hosted in Scotland could have been forced to pull out.
Scotland has a thriving data centre industry thanks to its cool climate, relatively inexpensive land and skilled workforce, while the country’s contact centre industry has boomed over recent years. Meanwhile, it was also claimed direct mail costs would soar, as any move to renationalise Royal Mail in Scotland would have been likely to have pushed delivery prices higher.
According to a report by Scottish Development International more than 86,000 people are employed within 400 contact centres, with 1 in 30 of the employed population across the central belt work in the industry.
However, many British companies have rules stating their data must be located in Britain, and so would have been forced to migrate their data from Scotland to the rest of the UK in the event of a split.
Uncertainty over whether or not Scotland would be a member of the European Union (EU) automatically or would have had to apply and wait for a number of years also posed a problem.
If Scotland had not automatically been member of the EU it would not be able to use the protection of EU regulation over data to reassure companies it is safe to host data there.

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