Data Sovereignty: The Cloud's Next Borderline

Data Sovereignty: The Cloud’s Next Borderline

As governments around the world attempt to protect and control the flow of their citizens’ information, data localization has presented an increasingly complex challenge for organizations. Countries are constantly introducing new, complex requirements in the wake of an ever-expanding number of data breaches and cyber-attacks. Organizations must implement proactive data residency strategies to gain customers’ trust and to comply with current and anticipated regulations. Will cloud computing rise to the challenge?

By 2021, over 120 countries enacted legislation whose purpose is to secure the protection of data and privacy. Although it’s true that some laws are designed primarily to keep data in-country — and not as a tool for protecting citizens’ rights — the ramifications for enterprises doing business in these countries are significant. It is virtually impossible for them to meet local or regional regulations, for example, GDPR in the EU, without making significant changes to how they collect and store data.

Collecting and Storing Data Locally: Using Which Cloud?

It’s not just a privacy issue: every country has its own particular systems and practices for how data must be organized and processed. Any given application — for example, personalized health care advice — may need to be adapted based on the norms or constraints of the country in which they choose to be active.

As more commercial operations spread across disparate geographies, it is becoming incredibly important — and challenging — for enterprises to set up cloud computing processes that meet each market’s unique data requirements. Some of the underlying reasons for this include:

  • The evolving difficulty of deploying workloads with users’ data across geographies and countries
  • Varied data locality considerations/requirements in conjunction with local laws
  • A lack of centralized cloud infrastructure for data privacy compliance and data governance

This complexity, and the challenges it presents for data localization in a distributed environment, can force enterprises to choose between a costly infrastructure investment or the forgoing of entry into new markets. Businesses must expand globally to remain competitive and profitable, but data sovereignty presents challenges organizations cannot hope to overcome on their own.

Cloud-Nativity, Compliance, and Flexibility

Laws are subject to change, and operations spread across varying geographic regions may suddenly find their organization out of compliance. Cloudflex is present in two world-class data centers with the required levels of compliance. This gives organizations the dynamic, granular control of their infrastructure necessary to meet regulated global data privacy requirements.

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