Providing further evidence that US government surveillance policies are harming the US public cloud industry, India recently announced that it would be formally asking up to 500,000 government employees to stop using popular cloud based email services like Gmail.
“Gmail data of Indian users resides in other countries as the servers are located outside. Currently, we are looking to address this in the government domain, where there are large amounts of critical data,” said J Satyanarayana, secretary in the department of electronics and information technology.
This statement says everything about how far we have gone down the public cloud rabbit hole since 2009. It is almost ancient memory to think that organizations and businesses pre-2009 were quite happy to have their infrastructure and data residing on premise or in a co-location facility. Today, almost 5 years into this public cloud mania, we see massive revolt to the concept of putting large and indiscriminate amounts of data into clouds that reside in other countries.
Some of you might say that this is just the Indian government saying this and that there is still plenty of opportunity for public cloud in the private sector. Well, this may be true, but the risk here is that India (and other countries) view public cloud as a direct threat to their national security and try to legislate against public cloud and move towards a “country cloud” form of policy. This would not be a good outcome since public cloud is only a small element of what cloud is and could be.
Private/hybrid cloud, or what I will call traditional managed services has the ability to bring data back into a well defined geographic area, while also providing for many of the common benefits we typically associate with cloud computing. To be clear, regulation of cloud is not the issue or the answer. Defining where the data resides…now that is worth discussing.