Data Sovereignty: How to Make It Work in a Cloud-first World
In our post-Covid world, IT departments are allotting significant resources to the management of endpoint device data. With data stored in the cloud – and an explosion of endpoint devices acting as extensions – many companies have shifted towards moving the primary home of their data from the endpoint devices to a cloud. As a result, data sovereignty becomes an issue and brings with it a unique set of challenges with enterprise data residing in multiple locations. This article by Tim DaRosa, CMO, Zadara takes a look at the strategies businesses can take to ensure they are adhering to data sovereignty rules.
A flood of ‘cloud-first’ strategies continues to gain momentum as critical business functions are continuously being migrated to the cloud. The trend of adoption of cloud technologies by organizations of all sizes has opened up markets that might not have made sense to a cloud vendor just a few years ago.
In our post-Covid world, IT departments everywhere are spending time and resources on managing endpoint device data. When an employee gets a new laptop, the IT department must help move data from the old to the new. When a branch office server fails, IT must restore the data from a backup and get operations running again. With data stored in the cloud – and an explosion of endpoint devices acting as extensions – a majority of companies have increasingly shifted towards moving the primary home of their data from the endpoint devices to a cloud.
As a result, data sovereignty brings its own unique set of challenges as enterprise data now resides in more locations than ever before. The same dataset may be subject to different laws depending on where it is collected or located and the legal and financial repercussions of data crossing international borders must be accounted for in a distributed computing model where data is often traveling from one part of the enterprise to another.
Considerations also exist for companies with locations in several countries that might want data to be shared across multiple regions – backup and disaster recovery comes to mind. Many cloud service providers automatically send the data to the closest data center. However, there may be cases where an organization would prefer to limit certain types of data to one region for legal reasons or to ensure data privacy.
Worth noting is that while sovereignty typically revolves around country-level requirements, there has been marked growth in demand for independent countries to band together based on close proximity to one another with an interest in creating regionally sovereign clouds. Country-level clouds have had to be subsidized by governments with substantial commitments to spend over a stated period of time. It is one reason why sovereignty at a regional level, such as Europe, is ostensibly more workable than at an individual country level.
