Data is an asset to any organization and, as its value contribution increases, so does the concern for protecting it. Most companies recognize the importance of having a data sovereignty strategy (according to a study by Vanson Bourne for Scalability, 98% of organizations in the United States and Europe already have policies in place or plan to implement them), if what they want is to build trust and create value.

Data sovereignty in the cloud is increasingly becoming a priority for organizations seeking secure, innovative and scalable solutions to manage it. Of course, to achieve data sovereignty, nearly half of companies (49%) are adopting hybrid or regional cloud services as an alternative to public clouds which raises more questions in terms of transparency and control.

The report reveals that most organizations in the countries surveyed have sovereign regulations or policies to store their data in certain locations (80%) or plan to do so (18%). In addition, there is little difference between France (where 81% of respondents have a policy), Germany (79%), the United Kingdom (82%) and the United States (78%). Only 2% of respondents worldwide said they did not have a sovereign policy in place, nor did they plan to implement it.

“It is encouraging to see that a large number of organizations, both in Europe and the United States, are taking data sovereignty seriously and have plans in the works, including a significant shift towards a hybrid cloud strategy,” highlights Paul. Speciale, director of marketing at Scaality. “This prevents organizations from being constrained by restrictions imposed by one cloud service provider. The very high yield in the United States could be due to growing concerns about China’s power in technology development.”

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Benefits for cloud technology

Cloud technologies will benefit from this trend, and IT teams will use a variety of data storage strategies to achieve sovereignty.

In this case, 40% will mostly store their data in a large public cloud, such as AWS regional offerings, Azure, or Google Cloud; 36% of respondents will implement a hybrid cloud solution; 13% will store their data with a regional cloud service provider; and 11% would choose a local data center.

Several large public cloud providers offer the option of storing data in a specific region, “which may not be suitable for many organizations that have highly sensitive data, or wish to avoid vendor lockouts and high data access/exit costs”, ensures from Scaality.

Obey the rules

137 of the world’s 194 countries have laws on data protection and privacy, something that encourages the use of hybrid clouds as a pivotal data strategy adopted by companies that must comply with data residency guidelines and local regulations required for data collection and processing.

36% of respondents choose a solution that combines a local or private cloud with a public cloud. This hybrid cloud approach provides flexibility and control to store data on-premises for data storage and sovereignty, while offering the freedom to easily migrate data to different platforms at any time.

Israel Serrano, responsible for Southern Europe at Scality, concludes convincingly that, from his company, “we’ve deployed more than one exabyte of storage across hundreds of clients in over 40 countries, ensuring that organizations don’t rely on public clouds or data access fees. or high out-of-pocket costs. With our solutions, we bring affordable, highly available, highly durable (14:9), scalable, and S3-compliant storage to all your applications with data immutability for ransomware protection.”