DBM Cloud Systems

WHAT IS DATA GEO-SOVEREIGNTY?


Thursday, April 27, 2017
Author: Al Basseri | SVP of Field Engineering, DBM Cloud Systems


A growing trend in cloud adoption is customers deploying in more than one public cloud and in hybrid cloud deployments with some of their data running on premise. Increasingly customers want flexibility and choice and the ability to ensure that their data never leaves their sovereign borders. For example, an international company may only want a subset or all of its data to reside on their local national cloud provider. What if there was a way to deploy an open software system that ensured this and allowed customers cloud neutrality. 

Today a new trend for customers and government entities is having their data exposed to cloud providers that cross many regions and borders. The idea of Data Geo-Sovereignty is increasing an important issue to consider. First, let us revisit Sovereignty, it is a type of political power, and it is exercised through some form of government control. 

If indeed your data can be accessed or stored in many Sovereign nations and regions through a cloud provider than your exposure and access to your data may fall under laws and rules of multiple sovereign nations with different governing rules. This may have a larger effect on your own customers and departments within a company. Your risk and costs may be much higher. 

It is one of those terms that might be tossed around without much thought. But it is increasing an important word within an elastic age of IT that involves a multi-cloud strategy. Whether you are using a US-based cloud provider or utilizing a non-US based cloud provider in other sovereign nations other than US, you have to recognize that Geo-Data Sovereignty draws from legal, political and business rules and laws that go across many borders. At times you might not be aware where your data actually resides in a multi-cloud deployment. To blindly trust a single cloud provider might not always be the wisest move, besides even each cloud provider might have different standards. Regardless, the practical approach for any multi-cloud customer is to have the ability to trust but verify. 

Having a single virtual view that has visibility across multiple cloud providers and can guide you in enforcing policy and more importantly alert you in regards to your exposure across other sovereign nations and regions is critical. Having the ability to set up policy based on regions, departments and other requirements are critical. 

At DBM Cloud Systems, we are excited to offer an open cloud software platform that can assist existing public and hybrid cloud customers with Data Geo-Sovereignty and control. It is one of many new features we are building with our Open Cloud Platform designed to give a multi-cloud customer choice and control. 


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