Global organizations are prioritizing cloud sovereignty as a secure, innovative and scalable solution to manage data, according to Capgemini Research Institute’s (CRI) latest report.
The report demonstrates that cloud sovereignty adoption is primarily driven by regulation and organizations’ need to control data, but that organizations also expect it to build trust, foster collaboration, and accelerate a move to a data-sharing ecosystem.
According to the research, organizations have some concerns about using the public cloud as the core of digital transformation projects: 69 percent of organizations cite potential exposure to extra-territorial laws in a cloud environment; 68 percent a lack of transparency and control over what is done with their data in the cloud, and 67 percent mention operational dependency on vendors based outside their region’s jurisdiction.
Capgemini’s data showed that a large majority of organizations globally believe they will adopt cloud sovereignty to ensure compliance with regulations (71 percent) or to bring in controls and transparency over their data (67 percent), whereas ensuring immunity from extra-territorial data access (65 percent) comes third.
Nearly half of the organizations surveyed (43 percent) globally define cloud sovereignty as keeping their data within their preferred jurisdiction, whatever the origin of the cloud provider, whereas only 14 percent define it as the exclusive use of cloud providers based in the same legal jurisdiction.
CRI’s report found that the demand for cloud services is shifting in line with new expectations around sovereignty and when asked about their expected cloud environment for the next one to three years, more than a third (38 percent) of organizations expected to have a public/hybrid cloud environment with local data centers. 30 percent expect to use a disconnected version or the local legal entity of a hyper-scaler, whereas 11 percent said they plan to work exclusively with cloud providers based within the same legal jurisdiction.
60 percent of organisations believe that cloud sovereignty will facilitate sharing data with trusted ecosystem partners, and 42 percent of surveyed executives believe that a trusted interoperable cloud service can help them to scale new technologies such as 5G, artificial intelligence (AI), and the internet of things (IoT).
Marc Reinhardt, head of public sector at Capgemini, said: “In our current environment, the sovereignty of one’s supply chain and IT has become truly strategic. For those organizations currently still reluctant to leverage the obvious benefits of the cloud, sovereignty is a way to get there. As a result, it is gaining importance across sectors and regions, to enable organisations to control and protect their data to an even greater extent – for the public sector, with emphasis on trust, transparency, choice, portability.”
