InCountry Founder & CEO Peter Yared sat down with staff to discuss the present and future of data residency. Here’s Part II, featuring wider-focused industry-related questions.
-What’s your main prediction for data residency in 2022?
PY: I think there’s going to be more and more data protection in Asia. Asia is high growth markets, and I think we’re going to see more data protection there.
-What industries are most affected by data compliance ?
PY: Financial services and healthcare are the two primary sectors that we see as highly-regulated and most affected. The governments care and the citizens care about how that data is handled.
-Did Covid have any impact on the way healthcare data was prioritized?
PY: Yeah, the thing was, a lot of people still operated by paper or internal systems, and all of a sudden now they have to take it all off. They have to do telehealth, they have to make their systems accessible to people online. A lot of in-person stuff, especially in global markets, shifted online very quickly which meant they had to get online providers and make sure those providers managed data regulations in their respective countries.
-Other than the obvious places, what are some countries to watch?
PY: We have the top ten on our website, and those places are 45% of the world population, 35% of GDP. Again, data regulations are very popular and will only get moreso over time.
-How will the Cloud Act affect hyperscalers?
PY: It has and it hasn’t. It’s happening already, where you have Gaia in Europe trying to build their own cloud infrastructure, in China they have several to choose from, so they aren’t as impacted, but really we see it as impacting more government business. For example, Sweden does not want their visa application process posted in Amazon’s US databases.
-How does the demise of the Privacy Shield affect US-EU data transfers?
PY: It’s become really painful because you have to do standard contract clauses, and that adds a whole layer of expensiveness to the whole thing, and it’s sort of fragmenting the internet. Now there are sites that just don’t operate some places. They’ll just block their website in markets where they don’t want to deal with data regulations.
-Do you think there’ll be a resolution to the situation in the near future?
PY: It doesn’t seem like it, because there’s a massive disconnect. The US just doesn’t have an equivalency, and that could be a real problem in the future. It all boils down to a lack of compromise in government. The process has to be bipartisan, but we can’t get there because there’s such little compromise. There are fifty different breach reporting standards for the states, and things badly need to be distilled down to a unified law, and that’s what some of the businesses want, they would prefer to have one breach reporting standard rather than fifty.
-What is the endgame of data governance?
PY: There’s no endgame to this, so it’s going to continue. What’s going to happen is more and more countries are going to have more and more rules. I’m old, I’ve been operating in the tech industry for a long time; thirty years ago, nothing was regulated, and now everything is regulated. And it’s not going to stop, people are tired of breaches and data being mistreated. Everyone sitting there and saying okay to cookie consents does not make things better. People want their data handled correctly and properly.