The UK government’s decision to designate datacentres as critical national infrastructure (CNI) in September 2024 signalled its ambition to build a digital economy that is secure and globally competitive.
But behind the headlines about protecting against cyber crime and IT blackouts lies a more complicated reality – a sector grappling with policy uncertainty, reliance on foreign cloud giants and a data sovereignty agenda that looks increasingly compromised.
In a blog post, Forrester principal analyst Tracy Woo wrote: “New sovereignty requirements such as SecNumCloud, Cloud de Confiance from France, and the Cloud Computing Compliance Controls Catalog (C5) from Germany, along with the push to keep data in-country, have created a broader push for private and sovereign clouds.”
But the promise of “protected infrastructure” rings hollow when hyperscalers openly admit they cannot guarantee that UK government data stored in cloud services such as Microsoft 365 and Azure will remain within national borders.
Woo points out that countries in the European Union (EU) and Asia-Pacific (APAC) have been attempting to more heavily leverage non-US-based cloud providers, create sovereign clouds, or leave workloads on-premise.
In the UK, regulatory scrutiny is exposing the fragile state of the UK’s digital independence. Looking at the UK’s approach to data sovereignty, law firm Kennedys Law describes the Data Use and Access (DUA) Bill, which was published in October 2024, as “a more flexible risk-based approach for international data transfers”.
Kennedys notes that the new test requires that the data protection standards in the destination jurisdiction must not be materially lower than those in the UK. According to Kennedys, this standard is less rigid than the EU’s “essential equivalence” requirement but raises questions about how “materially lower” will be interpreted in practice.
Understandably, with the government’s reliance on cloud-based productivity tools, concerns about compliance with UK data protection laws have intensified.
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