Comments on: Proposed: German cloud fortress for security-conscious shops http://gigaom.com/2011/09/19/proposed-german-cloud-fortress-for-security-conscious-shops/ Tue, 21 May 2013 08:39:55 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: storagewithoutborders http://gigaom.com/2011/09/19/proposed-german-cloud-fortress-for-security-conscious-shops/#comment-656656 Mon, 19 Sep 2011 23:36:53 +0000 http://gigaom.com/?p=407701#comment-656656 Questions of data sovereignty are not just a German or even European concern. I recently attended a conference of Government CIOs and other IT leaders in Canberra and it seems clear that jurisdictional access to certain kinds of data within political boundaries is likely to be the norm for the forseeable future. Furthermore highly personal medical and legal records, and data of national and strategic importance may never be stored in transnational clouds. Abstracting our the geographical location of data is a fine principal, but it is not a binary one. There are degrees to which data locality can be abstracted and national boundaries are in most cases sufficiently large to still provide the economies of scale required to make cloud computing effective.

I suspect that if most of the US’cloud computing data was destined to reside in mainland China, or even just countries where no data-breach reporting legislation exists (such as Australia), would leave most Americans feeling pretty happy with the idea that the data they produce stays in within the jurisdictional boundaries that they can effectively influence.

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