Sovereign cloud: Can it maintain sovereignty in your data

Recently I had an interaction with the Financial Express. There was a discussion held on “Sovereign cloud: can it maintain sovereignty in your data”. 

A state, country, or a larger region, like the European Union, may contain all or part of the data belonging to your company, but it must remain contained inside those boundaries. This need has several justifications. Maybe your industry is subject to government regulations, or maybe you handle particular kinds of regulated data, such as personally identifiable information (PII). Maybe there are competitive or industry-specific issues. Regardless of the underlying rationale, the necessity is known as digital sovereignty or data sovereignty.

But the latter word is misleading. Requirements for sovereignty compliance can extend beyond database table storage. It can be necessary for every computer processing regulated data, as well as every network, data flow, backup system, and disaster recovery plan, to be located inside a certain geographic area. At times, security clearances or citizenship in the relevant jurisdiction are prerequisites for accessing regulated systems.

Keeping everything in-house at a local data center is one-way businesses might meet the standards for digital sovereignty. Using the cloud is another option; more specifically, using a sovereign cloud that satisfies certain standards related to digital sovereignty while providing all the benefits of cloud computing.