What is the importance of data sovereignty in cloud infrastructure?

Data sovereignty is the term used to refer to the laws governing how data is generated, processed and stored in a given geographical location.

Given the global, borderless nature of cloud technology legislating on data sovereignty is important to ensure control over data usage, security, and privacy.

Organisations must take a holistic approach to data management, without compromising on resilience and compliance.

This results in cloud infrastructure that is strategic, well-governed and skilfully deployed.

It is important for capital markets’ Cloud Infrastructure as a Service providers to reassure organisations how the complexities of data sovereignty legislation and regulation are handled.

Policy-makers in different jurisdictions have recognised the measures that need to be taken to protect highly sensitive personal, commercial and financial data, and have acted accordingly, albeit independently.

This has led to different data sovereignty jurisdictions applying different laws according to their region.

There are tight controls over data transmission, with policies such as GDPR and data localisation legislation governing whether and how data can move from its source to another destination.

It is important to establish clear obligations on the hosting and control of data to avoid breaches of the law or of privacy.

Similarly with commercial competition and different strengths and weaknesses of third party cloud service providers data sovereignty legislation plays an important role in stabilising IaaS and other cloud capability provision.

Organisations must now make judicious decisions around where to store their data. Data residency policies can be based on various criteria including compliance with or avoidance of legal requirements, tax demands or system performance.

For example, financial trading environments demanding extreme low latency cloud computing are well-advised to establish data residency policies in the trading venue itself. This satisfies both performance and legislative requirements.

Above all organisations need clarity about where their data will be stored, how often it needs to be transferred from one place to another, what laws and financial regulations it will be subject to, and what the potential business harms are in data breaches.

Capital markets businesses will benefit from the depth of understanding, sophisticated infrastructure provision and economies of scale available from a specialist IaaS partner in the sector.

Digital data sovereignty considerations embrace infrastructure, strategy, governance framework and the skills required to navigate the complex landscape of data protection, security, resilience and compliance.

Beeks’ offering

As specialists in the technical infrastructure underpinning capital markets trading Beeks Group is highly experienced and knowledgeable about all the different permutations of private and public cloud capabilities, and how far these are suitable for the needs of financial institutions, while also meeting regulatory and legislative demands.

We offer secure connectivity, and high-performance, guaranteed private cloud infrastructure all around the globe, and can accommodate exclusive, single-tenant security requirements, as well as replication of hosting.

Whilst Beeks recognises the cost-effective value of public cloud shared resources offering businesses cost-effective services, we also recommend a ‘horses for courses’ approach. This means ensuring that our customers align the importance of their workload with the relevant solution.

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