The European Union's European Court of Justice ruled today that European regulators can strike down the "Safe Harbor" agreement, which allows European data to be legally transmitted and stored within the United States. While larger companies are as we speak finding work arounds to this legal ruling, including the creation or expansion of European data centers to house European citizen's data, there are larger consequences to this ruling that impact MSPs all over the world.
National Clouds Are Coming
If the ruling means a minor inconvenience for larger cloud companies, it signals and important trend that has been coming for several years now: the growing importance of national cloud computing. National clouds are legal and regulatory geographies mandating how, where, and who can touch data residing within that cloud computing environment.
The Safe Harbor agreement being invalidated means smaller MSPs everywhere now have a bit more leverage and ability to play a role in managing customer data compared to larger service providers who have more clumsy and inflexible cloud computing environments.
Alternatives to Safe Harbor
MSPs have never really cared about location of computing environments because MSPs are used to remote management. This is one reason why the disruption of Safe Harbor may not negatively impact MSPs like it would larger companies. MSPs can perform their duties using a variety of "cloud" environments anywhere they may reside around the world. If a customer wants more geo-specificity then a MSP should be able to provide it. This assumes, of course, the MSP partners with a cloud provider whose infrastructure is well defined and transparent.
This is all the Europeans want; their data to be left alone. And MSPs are quite capable of making this happen.
