Phil Shoesmith, head of IT for Alzheimer's Society UK (ASUK), said at Salesforce's annual event in San Francisco this week that an EU datacentre had been promised by the company some years ago and was still yet to materialise, which has left him frustrated.

ASUK is in the process of rolling out Salesforce's CRM application across the organisation in an attempt to centralise and standardise fragmented patient care data. Shoesmith told Computerworld UK that the project was 'significant' and had cost hundreds of thousands of pounds so far.

"UK and EU data protection is a big issue, particularly in government departments there was a lot of concern about using US based cloud solutions for client data," said Shoesmith.

"There is a slight frustration, because it was announced two or three years ago that there would be an EU datacentre and it's still not here. We would like to see one for risk mitigation."

Shoesmith said that as part of the due diligence process to get the project approved, and to have UK client data sitting on servers in the US, he sought assurances from the Information Commissioner's Office and the Cabinet Office. However, whilst both were willing to approve the process of due diligence that ASUK undertook, neither would give it a 'legally binding' yes or no for it to use Salesforce.