Where does data sovereignty begin?

Having been talking about cloud and running Paradyne for almost 3 years I’ve come across the “data sovereignty” objection many times.

While it may not be something that my US readers are familiar with due to the fact they have localised data centres – it is an issue often raised in Australia as for many prospective customers looking at utilising Tier 1 cloud providers such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Rackspace.

Recently Amazon launched a local service in Australia, and Rackspace is currently underway to do the same. While Google and Microsoft provide the most popular SaaS solutions for business – neither have indicated any plans to build local data centres.

This begs the question – how do organisations looking to move to the cloud deal with their concerns around data sovereignty? There are three approaches available to organisations concerned by this:

1. Keep their data on-premises or completely in an Australian data centre – which can result in potentially a lower-level offering/service with higher costs

2. Encrypt all data which adds to overheads, file sizes and complexity

 3. Classify the data before choosing which cloud service provider and location can be used

While data classification was listed as 3rd – it is always my first response in any data sovereignty conversation.

I recently wrote an article for Dynamic Business explaining how data sovereignty starts with data classification.


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