As governments around the world attempt to protect their citizens’ information, data localization has presented an increasingly complex challenge for organizations. Countries are constantly introducing new, complex requirements in the wake of an ever-expanding number of data breaches and cyber-attacks.
Many organizations have realized that they must implement proactive data residency strategies, not only to comply with current and anticipated regulations but also to gain their customers’ trust.
Can cloud computing rise to the challenge?
The Snowden revelations in 2013 may have been the catalyst, but in truth, awareness about the use of personal information developed into a political issue as early as the beginning of the century.
The championing of “the right to be forgotten” and the seemingly endless — and brazen — Wikileaks publications created the public pressure that led to the enactment of many new data privacy laws, particularly in the European Union, Canada, and Australia.
By 2022, over 130 countries have enacted legislation whose purpose is to secure the protection of data and privacy. Although it’s true that some laws are designed primarily to keep data in-country — and not as a tool for protecting citizens’ rights — the ramifications for enterprises doing business in these countries are significant.
It is virtually impossible for them to meet local or regional regulations, for example, GDPR in the EU, without making significant changes to how they collect and store data.
Collecting and Storing Data Locally: Using Which Cloud?
It’s not just a privacy issue: every country has its own particular systems and practices for how data must be organized and processed. Any given application — for example, personalized health care advice — may need to be adapted based on the norms or constraints of the country in which they choose to be active.
As more commercial operations spread across disparate geographies, it is becoming incredibly important — and challenging — for enterprises to set up cloud computing processes that meet each market’s unique data requirements. Some of the underlying reasons for this include:
The evolving difficulty of deploying workloads with users’ data across geographies and countries
Varied data locality considerations/requirements in conjunction with local laws
A lack of centralized cloud infrastructure for data privacy compliance and data governance
This complexity, and the challenges it presents for data localization in a distributed environment, can force enterprises to choose between a costly infrastructure investment or the forgoing of entry into new markets.
Businesses must expand globally to remain competitive and profitable, but data sovereignty presents challenges organizations cannot hope to overcome on their own.
The Distributed Cloud: The Next Step in Data Compliance and Security
Sustained data privacy compliance requires a comprehensive, cloud-focused approach that favors expansive geographic distribution through an evolving data management approach. To address this challenge, a new cloud paradigm has emerged: the distributed cloud.
Ridge has developed a massively distributed cloud platform that enables application developers to deliver modern workloads locally from a globally distributed network of data centers and local cloud providers.
Ridge Cloud was built by federating thousands of local data centers and cloud providers. Developers use it independently, or in a multi-cloud scheme, as an extension of their public cloud deployments. Using the massively distributed Ridge Network, applications are deployed at the resolution of a geographic region or even of a metropolitan area.
Ridge Cloud combines the agility of the public cloud with the high performance and data control of private infrastructure. It converts heterogeneous infrastructure into a homogeneous cloud computing platform, which can be leveraged to support the delivery of cloud services where data is actually generated and consumed.
Cloud-Nativity, Compliance, and Flexibility
Laws are subject to change, and operations spread across varying geographic regions may suddenly find their organization out of compliance.
Ridge enables organizations to programmatically select cloud data centers based upon location and required levels of compliance. This gives organizations the dynamic, granular control of their infrastructure necessary to meet regulated global data privacy requirements.
The Ridge Cloud simplifies distributed data management for global organizations and enables them to meet local and global data privacy regulations for current and future needs.
Ridge offers the following services:
Global deployment of data and workloads in unlimited geographies
24/7, SLA based support
Transparent, cloud-based, pay-per-use billing model
Fully programmatic, developer-friendly APIs
There’s no need to choose between the ease of deployment, data sovereignty, and performance.
To learn more about how Ridge can help you win the data sovereignty battle, book a demo.
About Ridge
Ridge goes beyond the public cloud with a flexible cloud that’s anywhere you need to be. Ridge Cloud integrates into multiple locations and technology stacks to offer a full cloud experience on top of any underlying infrastructure — public or private.
Businesses get a cloud customized for their specific throughput, locality, and commercial requirements. Without any installation or CAPEX, Ridge leverages existing servers and runs application workloads on any IaaS, virtualization, or bare-metal machines.
Whether you need to deploy in a private data center, on-prem, edge micro-center, or even in a multi-facility hybrid environment, Ridge expands your footprint without limits
Author:
Jonathan Seelig, Co-Founder & Executive Chairman | Ridge
Co-founder of Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM), the first-ever CDN. Former Managing Director at Globespan Capital Partners, Chairman of the board at Zipcar, and EIR at Polaris Partners. Board Member of over a dozen companies and investor in dozens more. Stanford undergrad and MIT Sloan dropout.
Cloud U.Enroll in higher education at Ridge University
