{"id":48886,"date":"2022-10-14T10:01:46","date_gmt":"2022-10-14T10:01:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.threatshub.org\/blog\/just-how-critical-is-data-sovereignty\/"},"modified":"2022-10-14T10:01:46","modified_gmt":"2022-10-14T10:01:46","slug":"just-how-critical-is-data-sovereignty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.threatshub.org\/blog\/just-how-critical-is-data-sovereignty\/","title":{"rendered":"Just how critical is data sovereignty?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sponsored Feature<\/span> We hear the term data sovereignty more and more these days. That’s strange in some ways because the rules for flinging data around the world have been a challenge for decades \u2013 particularly since the internet hit critical mass in the late 1990s and early 2000s and international data transfers went from being a rarity to the norm.<\/p>\n

Before we explore the reasons for this, let’s just define the term in the interests of clarity. One of the better definitions<\/a> describes it as “the concept that information which has been converted and stored in binary digital form is subject to the laws of the country in which it is located”. But what does that actually mean? Simple: if I’m a British firm that collects data here in the UK, and stores it on a server in a different country, the laws of that country may entitle someone (such as the country’s government or law enforcement agencies) to access that data, possibly to a greater extent than UK law would have allowed had I stored it in (say) a London data centre.<\/p>\n

And taking it a step further, say I decide to collect private data pertaining to UK citizens and store it on a US-based cloud provider’s architecture in Amsterdam. From a data protection point of view (noting that data protection and data sovereignty are different things) this is fairly straightforward, as the UK and EU regard each other’s data protection legislation as “adequate<\/a>” for the safe processing of personal data. But what if a US court demands the cloud provider \u2013 an American company \u2013 provide it with a copy of your data from its Netherlands-based servers? Surely their hands are tied, and they have to do so?<\/p>\n