Irreverence

posted on 22 July 2008 12:44

EMC is planning new data centers for its cloud computing service in Australia, China, Japan and Korea. However, it says, data protectionism by nation states is a potential issue.

The big issue is wheether data collected and stoed in one nation state can be exported. If an EMC Fortress platform undepinning Mozy collects information in country can it be accessed from another country? EMC VP Technology Alliances is reported as saying: "“Before we spend $50million or 100 million on a data centre, we want to know about the laws in place in the country the data centre resides. We want transparency … and the ability for information to leave transparently across borders. The EU says that information created within its borders cannot leave the EU. This creates a problem if a data centre is in Switzerland.”

Actually a bad example as Switzerland is not actually in the European Union, but we get the idea. Is it a real hurdle to cross? This issue hasn't come up before. We've not heard about it from any other cloud storage service provider.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}