Data sovereignty strategies embraced by 98% of IT decision makers

Scality has published the results of an independent survey of IT decision makers across France, Germany, the UK, and the US about their data sovereignty strategies. 98% of organisations already have policies in place or have plans to implement them. To achieve data sovereignty, 49% of IT decision makers are using hybrid cloud or regional cloud service providers as an alternative to the public cloud.  

137 out of 194 countries in the world have data protection and privacy legislation in place.1 As a result, organisations must adhere to the data residency guidance and local regulations required for data collection and processing.  

According to the survey — conducted by global technology 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%) or have plans to do so (18%). The report reveals minimal differences between France (where 81% of respondents have policies in place), Germany (79%), UK (82%), and US (78%). Just 2% of respondents worldwide said they do not have sovereignty policies in place, nor do they plan to implement them.  

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% primarily (will) store their data on a large public cloud, such as regional offerings by AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud 

36% of respondents (will) deploy a combined on-premises/public cloud solution, i.e. hybrid cloud 

13% (will) store their data with a regional cloud service provider 

11% (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 cloud sovereignty emerges as viable strategy to meet regulations

36% of respondents opted for a solution that combines on-premises or private cloud/s with public cloud/s. 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.  

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