A quarter of British and Canadian businesses want their data taken out of U.S., according to Peer1
The NSA's shenanigans are having a very real effect on businesses' data storage decisions, according to Canadian cloud and hosting provider Peer1. — The company surveyed 300 businesses …
Context & Ripple Effects
Peer1's finding lands six months after PRISM revelations had already begun costing U.S. cloud companies business, turning an anecdotal pattern into survey evidence: a quarter of 300 British and Canadian firms polled want their data relocated out of the United States, with NSA surveillance named as the driver.
The survey also quantifies what Bloomberg described in late December 2013 as a new corporate artifact — the keep-my-data-out-of-the-U.S. clause now appearing in customer contracts — meaning buyers are formalizing the preference Peer1 measured. Wide syndication through outlets like USA Today and Network World shows how far the data-residency anxiety has travelled beyond the security press.
First-order effects
- Non-U.S. hosting providers such as Peer1 gain a concrete sales wedge against American cloud rivals, who now face churn risk among British and Canadian customers citing NSA surveillance in relocation decisions.
Second-order effects
- U.S. cloud vendors face pressure to build foreign data centers and contractual data-residency guarantees to retain international customers rather than cede those accounts to local competitors.
Third-order effects
- If the keep-my-data-out clause becomes standard procurement language, cloud infrastructure fragments along jurisdictional lines, making where data physically sits a priced product feature rather than an implementation detail.
The trend: Post-PRISM, data sovereignty is hardening from a compliance footnote into a primary purchasing criterion that is splitting the cloud market along national borders.