The cloud has delivered spectacular results for many digital transformation projects for businesses across all industries. But we have begun to learn that we cannot decouple data from our physical world as easily as we once hoped.
As geopolitical and cybersecurity risks have shifted rapidly over recent years, the question of data sovereignty has become more than a casual discussion. According to a United Nations report, there are now 128 nations with data privacy and protection laws, with sovereignty playing an increasing role in the way these requirements are legislated.
“Sovereignty reflects the increasing velocity and value of data,” says Phil Dawson, Managing Director of AUCloud. “Customers and governments have become rightly concerned about maintaining full control over data.”
The trend toward sovereignty
Engineered from the ground up for sovereign data protection, AUCloud cloud services exclusively serve government, defence, national intelligence, critical infrastructure industries and the growing number of security-conscious enterprises. From Dawson’s perspective, he sees a growing concern across all regulated industries about being prepared for a future where data sovereignty is an ever-increasing trend.
“This is a global trend,” says Dawson. “VMware, Accenture, IDC, Gartner – they’re all talking about growing sovereignty trends. It is quickly becoming something that every enterprise and every service provider – from PaaS to SaaS to systems integrators and managed service providers – will all have to think about.”
While recent cybersecurity incidents have seen terrible impacts on the personal data of Australians, Dawson feels it is important to move the discussion beyond questions of security for Personally Identifiable Information. When it comes to risk mitigation, sovereignty includes protecting critical data of all kinds.
“Data that runs our electricity providers, data that underpins water and sewage systems,” says Dawson. “If we lose control of critical systems data, it doesn’t just impact operations and customers, it impacts the economy and the public’s confidence in government.”
How deep should risk mitigation run?
As the trend has grown, global cloud service providers have worked hard to offer Australian data centre hosting, but their claims can fall short of achieving true ‘sovereignty’. Data may be physically stored in Australia, while accompanying account, support, monitoring and analytics data, and even critical metadata, can be routinely moved offshore – often unencrypted.
Of more concern, it can also be legally accessed by the foreign jurisdiction in which the cloud provider is owned and operated.
“If you need to give assurances to customers of a service that you’re delivering a sovereign service, can you really guarantee all their data stays onshore and is not subject to being accessed by a foreign jurisdiction?” Dawson asks.
“Service providers need to think about where the support data lives, where the metadata lives, where the analytics data lives. Are you truly sovereign if this information is moved outside our borders and when your cloud provider is subject to the laws of the jurisdiction in which they are owned?”
Knowing where every facet of their data resides, and where and how it is moved, will become increasingly valued by customers as questions of sovereignty grow. Planning how and where you choose to migrate, or build cloud deployments as customer demands and legislation change, is a crucial first step in readiness for the future.
Local data, local accountability
For those that choose to move workloads into a sovereign cloud provider, there can be additional benefits beyond the risk mitigation concerns that are driving most of the current trends. Local service means local assurance and local accountability.
“At AUCloud we’ve found customers really do value being able to pick up the phone and know our support is always available right here in Australia,” says Dawson. “It’s not just a nice feeling, it’s a practical benefit of a local service, that is not faceless and is responsive when they need it.”
It will also be increasingly important to understand who shares your cloud data environment – something not transparent with large-scale global cloud providers.
“For AUCloud, all customers and partners that use our platform have the assurance that everyone on our platform has agreed to comply to the same level of security protections and mitigation activities,” says Dawson. “Our policies and processes ensure it is not an ‘anything goes’ cloud service. We guarantee our customers that their data is hosted in an environment with like-minded organisations who take great care in how access to their data is managed.”
This is not to say that every workload must have sovereign data protection. But what is clear, is that every organisation now needs to proactively think about the nature and sensitivity of the data they have and ensure it is protected appropriately – including as demands for privacy and security mature in the future.
As new government legislation is enacted in the wake of recent cybersecurity incidents, and the Office of the Information Commissioner is granted additional funding to investigate data security, it is an ideal time to examine how Australian businesses and service providers are positioned to assess their data and manage it appropriately in the future
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