GDPR, China, and data sovereignty are ultimately wins for Amazon and Google
However, the more interesting analysis is around who the winners of these laws will be (besides the lawyers of course). To me, it’s clear that the complexity around these data sovereignty laws ultimately benefits highly-scaled service providers who can manage the nuanced regulations around these laws in an automated fashion. That means, ironically, that Google will likely win long-term on its cloud side, along with other major cloud providers like Amazon and Microsoft Azure.
That free market in data is rapidly disintegrating as governments increasingly take an interest in data, not just for privacy reasons, but also for population thought control and economic growth purposes. For software developers writing applications, that portends a complicated world for managing global and even potentially national data laws — a context that is going to be deeply enriching for service providers who can successfully help clients navigate this new world.
These new laws can be broadly grouped under the term “data sovereignty,” which is one of those terms you say at the World Economic Forum to sound like you are in the know.
While the European Union’s GDPR regulation has gotten the most press (probably because of the several dozen emails you received about it), the EU is hardly the only government enhancing its data sovereignty. China placed into force a law requiring all cloud computing and Chinese customer data to be hosted on China-based servers, and Russia has also been blocking Google and Amazon cloud services in an increasing war with Telegram. Many other countrieshave laws affecting how data can be stored and transmitted as well.
These laws are quite different, but they all serve the same purpose — to bring data back home and ensure that the desires of a country’s people (and, of course, its leaders) can be imprinted on how that data is used.
Here’s the challenge: these laws are enormously complicated and completely incompatible with one another.
Storing your own data isn’t just risky from a security perspective, it is also increasingly untenable in the fast currents of this data sovereignty world.
GDPR has been described as an anti-Google law, but it may turn out to be the greatest forcing function to drive adoption of Google Cloud. The irony may be that the supposed losers may well turn out to be the biggest winners after all.
See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/29/gdpr-and-the-cloud-winners/?utm_medium=TCnewsletter