 and security regulations mandated by governments for specific industries, particularly healthcare and finance. All countries have rules about guarding private information located in the cloud and personal information transferred to data centers in other countries. In the United States, healthcare organizations are required to follow HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) rules on protecting the privacy of people's medical records. Retailers are bound by PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) regulations. Government agencies need to follow the 2002 Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), legislation that defines security practices to protect government information, as well defenses against natural or man-made threats. Financial firms have specific privacy and security regulations as well. Adhering to the myriad of rules internationally in different countries often means that companies with a presence in, say, the U.S. and the European Union need to establish separate data centers that adhere to Europe's privacy and security rules. The same holds true in Asia and Pacific Rim countries. Moving that information to other countries is also subject to privacy rules. The EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Prior to 2015, the European Union and the United States Department of Commerce had agreed upon ways to protect European Union citizens' information stored in United States companies' cloud centers in both the United States and Europe. In 2015, in response to a privacy suit filed against Facebook, the 28-country European Union's highest court, the European Court of Justice, invalidated the earlier EU-U.S. Safe Harbor agreement that set out terms for companies in the United States to transfer cloud-based data containing personal information about European Union members to data www.TechnicalPDF.com centers in the United States. The 2015 ruling requires United States companies moving files out of Europe that contain information about Europeans to follow EU privacy guidelines. The Europ