Data sovereignty high up in cloud buyer decision-making - IDC

The analysts say data sovereignty considerations will strongly influence service provider selection decisions this year

A global survey from IDC has found that data sovereignty and compliance are now an important factor in shaping IT selection and design decisions.

Almost half (48 per cent ) of respondents to IDC's Cloud Pulse Q2 2022 survey revealed that data sovereignty and industry compliance have factored highly in discussions about their future IT architectures.

Of the total 1,350 surveyed, only four per cent of respondents believe their IT organisations will not be impacted by data sovereignty and compliance considerations.

Among the organisations that expect their IT budgets to increase in the coming year, IDC found the vast majority believe data sovereignty and industry compliance considerations will strongly influence service provider selection decisions and decisions about their primary datacentre environments.

"IDC expects data sovereignty and industry compliance considerations to be of increasing importance to decisions about the design, operation, and management of IT architectures, including the selection of cloud service providers," said senior research director of BuyerView research, Chris Drake.

"This partly reflects the growing importance of regulation, including GDPR, which emphasises the importance of personal data protection and provides specific rules about data storage and transfer."

The rise of 'sovereign cloud'

The research house added data sovereignty is "largely unambiguous" at this point with rules already in place within the EU and in other jurisdictions about data use, storage, and movement.

The evolution of EU data regulation that started with GDPR in 2018 is being extended to the Data Governance Act. As a result, enterprises that operate in Europe need technology solutions that provide a holistic view of how data is collected, classified, processed, and stored to ensure data regulations are being met.

In 2020, an A-list of French and German companies, with the backing of Germany, France and the European Commission, set up Gaia X to reduce Europe's dependence on American and Chinese cloud providers.

While VMware heavily discussed the sovereign cloud at its partner event Explore Europe 2022 in November.

During the conference the vendor announced the number of VMware Sovereign Cloud Providers had more than doubled to 25 partners globally, as well as an array of new sovereign cloud solutions.