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Public cloud: Why data sovereignty and data security is a growing UK issue

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Public cloud: Why data sovereignty and data security is a growing UK issue

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.

– Photo by C Dustin on Unsplash

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Data sovereignty. Is Gaia-X on course to challenge the big tech platforms?

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Data sovereignty. Is Gaia-X on course to challenge the big tech platforms?

If anyone were in doubt of the impact that the misuse of data can have on businesses and nation states, they’d need to look no further than the recent investigations surrounding Team Jorge in Israel, the disinformation unit that allegedly worked to disrupt elections in countries worldwide.

Five years on, the Cambridge Analytica scandal is a reminder of how data is increasingly woven into the fabric of modern society and the dangers when it is weaponised.

While arguably it was Edward Snowden’s 2013 whistle-blowing of National Security Agency activities that triggered global discussions on data sovereignty, the Cambridge Analytica events accelerated it.

Just a year later, aware of the growing importance of cloud computing as the backbone of modern technology, governments in Germany and France came up with a cunning plan.

Today, that plan has evolved into what is called Gaia-X, an association of governments, technology firms, academics, public bodies and not-for-profits that is working to define a common way to solve Europe’s digital sovereignty conundrum. The need, according to Francesco Bonfiglio, CEO of Gaia-X, is being driven by the fact that big tech platforms are controlling everything.

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Cloud controls: why firms are rethinking how they store and manage data

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Cloud controls: why firms are rethinking how they store and manage data

When Uber announced in February that it was ditching its on-premises data centres and moving its business to the cloud with Oracle, IT professionals around the country would not have been in the least surprised.

Here was another example of an organisation admitting it’s not in the business of running data centres. As its CEO Dara Khosrowshahi put it, Uber is in the business of “revolutionising the way people and products move across continents and through cities”. Not forgetting that the deal with Oracle aims to “maximise innovation while reducing overall infrastructure costs” for Uber.

There it is in a nutshell. Cloud computing can help businesses slash costs while becoming amazing for the very reason they exist in the first place. If only it were that simple.

Uber’s shift from running its own data centres to moving to cloud services is significant. As Steen Dalgas, senior cloud economist at cloud infrastructure firm Nutanix suggests, data centres have become “increasingly expensive and complex to run”. Volatile energy costs and coping with the scale of generated data have made running data centres untenable, which is part of the reason the cloud seems so attractive.

But businesses must be careful. The image of cloud computing as a cheaper alternative is fair enough – to a point. Dalgas talks about the sticking plaster analogy and highlights how one of Nutanix’s customers started a cloud transformation three years ago, only to determine it was “too difficult and expensive to go to the public cloud”.

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