Data Policy Wars to Drive Cloud Platform Innovation

By Kalle Kagi, VP of European Operations and Corporate Development at Intertrust

With the launch of AWS and the mainstreaming of cloud computing, commercial use of data has exploded. But, the various SaaS and social media services enabled by cloud computing have also resulted in governments around the world enacting an ever-growing number of regulations on the industry. Facing this unstoppable trend, cloud platform companies need to meet it by innovating in ways that will benefit the industry as a whole.

The first shots in this "war" have come in the name of data privacy. Responding to citizens' concerns, governments are pursuing policies that try to balance data privacy and a flexible business environment. 

Starting with the GDPR, the EU has acted as the data privacy flagship by introducing policies to guarantee its citizens rights vis a vis the ever-growing internet industry represented by Google, Facebook, etc. Countries with large markets such as China and India are also instituting data privacy regulations. Even in the U.S., state governments like California are devising their own. Of course, another driving force behind data privacy regulations is protecting national economic interests. 

With the expansion of these regulations, single cloud data repositories are becoming nearly impossible. Since data storage tends to grow infinitely, it is becoming harder and more expensive to migrate everything into a single cloud location anyway. 

The cloud computing industry is now challenged to create solutions able to analyze data from multiple sources. Today, it is relatively easy to create a custom solution to securely analyze data subsets from a small number of predetermined datasets. It is still difficult to create a fully customizable data management system capable of connecting to any desired third-party data source, securing data rights, and making the system fast and scalable. In 2021, cloud computing platforms will need to innovate to meet this demand.

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About the Author

Kalle Kagi is VP of European Operations and Corporate Development at Intertrust. 30 years of innovation and counting, Intertrust's solutions are uniquely suited to today's distributed computing environments. From IoT to the cloud, our products ensure the security, privacy, and policy enforcement required for trusted data sharing and governance. https://www.intertrust.com/