Do you know where your data is right now? If you don’t know where it is then you can’t guarantee what someone is doing with it. Scary stuff.
You might not think that where your data is kept matters, but you’d be wrong. You share information about yourself with many different services and there’s more about you out there than you probably realize. Keeping your data in local clouds is an important part of taking back control.
Bigger Isn’t Always Better
Hyperscalers talk about how their cloud solutions and services are in the same place as the data they’re storing, but can you trust that? Businesses of that size are often hard to communicate with and have so many different aspects to the solutions they offer; so that data can be moved or copied without the relevant controllers even being aware. That’s the danger of hyperscalers – their scale.
All of the major hyperscalers are American and so even if you select a European data center, there really isn’t any guarantee that your data is going to stay where you want it to. That means that you can potentially be in breach of GDPR without even knowing.
Who Cares
So why should the average person care about this? Well, because companies everywhere are using people’s data to shape the world that we live in. That means companies decide what products you see, where you see them, and even how they are priced. While that might be appealing to some, how comfortable are you that someone you don’t know on the other side of the earth knows your home address, date of birth, and shopping preferences?
There needs to be a change in mindset on how to offer data storage. That means a change in how we all deal with company data, personal data – everything. Even metadata can also have analytics done on it, so the whole subject needs to be looked at critically.
There is a huge amount of ‘invisible’ data capture going on during your daily life. If you’ve driven down a motorway recently then there is video footage of you stored somewhere. You didn’t agree to that but it’s still out there.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal was the first big wake-up moment for a lot of people and its impact has started to create some changes. Any agreement to data processing, i.e. use, of data should be explicit and necessary. That’s a really basic principle of data protection laws everywhere but people need to be educated about it.
But there isn’t that much focus on talking about it from governments so people don’t understand how their data is being used without their knowledge. While governments might be slow to educate and struggle to keep up with a landscape that is changing so rapidly, businesses do have a chance to make a difference. We want to be responsible for our customer’s data so we keep your data as close to you as possible, wherever that is.
Want to find out more about how your data is dealt with? Speak to whitesky.cloud today.
