Is Hybrid Cloud The Solution to African Data Sovereignty? (Part 1)

The in-country Processing and Storage of sensitive data is a legal requirement for many African countries, and for good reason. Having foreign companies, or governments, having access to sensitive data on your population has significant risks for both health policy and national security.

However there’s a practical problem about this requirement.?

The limited data center infrastructure on the continent means that the most cost effective, and best in class tools for data management, aren’t compliant in Africa.

With the bulk of the cloud tools, storage, and processing capacity being done by the big tech of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle, compliance problems arise when you consider the lack of data centers in-country.

Healthcare Data Controllers are faced with a simple dilemma.?

Make use of the global cloud providers and fall foul of the regulations. Or spend a lot of money on local data centers (which are high-priced, slower, and without the out of the box tools), or make their own on premise servers.?

However there is a third and middle path. The Hybrid-Cloud

1. Use local servers (local cloud providers / on premise servers) to store all of the sensitive data.?
2. Utilize a data anonymization tool on the locally stored data.?
3. Use the Global cloud providers for the data processing, storage capacity, or for their tools (like AI models, analytics and Prediction) on the anonymized data

Using Kapsule's three step process you can get the best of both worlds, without compromising data sovereignty, or compliance.

This three step methodology lays the groundwork to be able to do a lot of cool stuff.

Whether you want to create an AI model that can read medical imaging, or create predictive models for disease outbreak or medicine supply, or want to identify regions within a country that should be prioritized for investment based on projected ROI, this is all possible with our approach.

We’ve put it into practice too. This approach has been utilized by our multinational clients, NGOs, HealthTech partners, and soon to be by government institutions.?

In the next article I’ll go into more about how to implement our Hybrid-cloud, three step process.?

P.S. If you are handling large amounts of sensitive data in Africa, and you are curious about how to utilize the cloud providers ( Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure etc.) in a compliant way, please feel free to reach out to me directly.?

[email protected]