Data Sovereignty Worries Drive Hybrid Cloud Adoption, Says Scality

Object, file and cloud storage software company Scality has noted the impact on cloud environments of data sovereignty regulations.

The San Francisco-based firm published the results of a survey of IT decision makers across France, Germany, the UK, and the US about their data sovereignty strategies.

It found that data sovereignty strategies have been embraced by nearly all IT decision makers in Europe and US. Indeed, 98 percent of organisations already have policies in place or have plans to implement them.

Data sovereignty

And this is having an impact on pure public cloud usage.

To achieve data sovereignty, 49 percent of IT decision makers are using hybrid cloud or regional cloud service providers as an alternative to the public cloud.

Scality noted that so far 137 out of 194 countries in the world have data protection and privacy legislation in place. As a result, organisations have to adhere to the data residency guidance and local regulations required for data collection and processing.

According to the survey – conducted by market research firm Vanson Bourne – the vast majority of organisations across all four countries either have sovereignty regulations or policies in place to keep their data in specific locations (80 percent) or have plans to do so (18 percent).

The report revealed minimal differences between France (where 81 percent of respondents have policies in place), Germany (79 percent), UK (82 percent), and US (78 percent).

Just 2 percent of respondents worldwide said they do not have sovereignty policies in place, nor do they plan to implement them.

Scality noted that cloud technologies will benefit from this trend, with IT teams employing a number of data storage strategies to achieve sovereignty. Across the four geographies, of the organisations that have sovereignty policies or plans:

• 40 percent primarily (will) store their data on a large public cloud, such as regional offerings by AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud
• 36 percent of respondents (will) deploy a combined on-premises/public cloud solution, i.e. hybrid cloud
• 13 percent (will) store their data with a regional cloud service provider
• 11 percent (will) use an on-premises data centre.

While some large public cloud providers offer options to store data in specific regions, this isn’t suitable for many organisations that own highly sensitive data, or who wish to avoid vendor lock in and high data access or egress fees.

Hybrid clouds

The research concluded that hybrid cloud sovereignty is emerging as a viable strategy to meet these data sovereignty regulations.

Indeed, 36 percent of respondents opted for a solution that combines on-premises or private cloud/s with public clouds. Scality noted that this hybrid cloud approach provides the flexibility and control to store data locally for data residency and sovereignty while providing the freedom to easily migrate data to a different platform at any time.

“It’s extremely encouraging to see that such a high number of organisations in the US as well as Europe are taking data sovereignty seriously and have plans in place, including a significant shift toward hybrid-cloud strategies,” said Paul Speciale, chief marketing officer at Scality.

“This can certainly help organisations prevent cloud lock-in and provide safety in having data stored locally or in multiple locations,” said Speciale. “The surprisingly high results in the US could be due to growing concerns regarding China’s strength in technology development.”

Drilling down into the research for UK readers, key findings of the Scality survey in the UK include:

• 82 percent of UK respondents have already adopted data sovereignty policies, and 13 percent have plans to do so; 5 percent do not plan to implement them, and are most likely to come from a smaller sized organisation (1,000-2,999 employees)
• In the UK, organisations from the IT, technology, and telecoms sector (92 percent), the business and professional services sector (90 percent), and the financial services sector (88 percent) are most likely to already have policies in place
• Manufacturing organisations are significantly behind the UK average of 82 percent, with 62 percent having policies in place, while 31 percent have plans to implement them
• To implement data sovereignty policies, 33 percent of UK respondents (will) use a large public cloud service, 42 percent a hybrid cloud, 14 percent a regional service provider, and 12 percent an on-premises data centre
• UK respondents from smaller organisations (1,000-2,999 employees) compared to larger organisations (3,000+ employees) are significantly more likely to select a public cloud service (45 percent vs 25 percent), and less likely to select a hybrid cloud (32 vs 49 percent).