Broadband internet gives us a unique opportunity to work from anywhere. It doesn’t matter where you are or where you operate. The person on the other side of the Zoom screen will be none the wiser if you’re joining the call from NYC, Portugal or Africa. What matters is that the bandwidth is sufficient.
Comedian and entrepreneur, James Altucher, recently wrote an article stating that New York is dead forever.
According to him, it all boils down to bandwidth. With average internet speeds ten times as fast as ten years ago, coupled with the new widespread work-from-home pandemic practices, puts forth that New York City is no longer the cultural epicenter it used to be. Everything has gone remote.
Fast And Local Data
With low average internet speeds of 20 Mbits per second within New York City, people are now seriously questioning why they feel compelled to stay in a culturally locked-down city. The flexibility of the new work from home practices means many people can pack up and relocate to somewhere much cheaper – with faster, or fast-enough internet connections. And for bandwidth to be fast, it must be local.
For businesses, especially companies going cloud-native, keeping data local is becoming more crucial. The big reason is data governance, driven by questions of data sovereignty. Companies all over the world want to keep their data local for regulatory reasons.
In the US political regulatory environment, it’s crucial to store information on American soil. And in Europe, GDPR makes it downright illegal for other countries to handle customer-centric data. Many European corporations also feel strongly about not giving the current US watchdog agencies a catalyst to monitor or confiscate their valuable data. Governmental institutions must practice data sovereignty. Privacy must prevail – also in this open world.
Money Saving And More Secure
When data is sent over long distances, there is also the possibility of data corruption and other security issues – including problems like increased latency and lag times. It’s even more costly to pull data from far away. To minimize these issues and reduce the cost of bandwidth, keeping data local is always an excellent idea.
For example, a German company needs its data to stay within the physical boundaries of the country for GDPR compliance. If it had some of its private data stored in another country, problems could arise if the country the data resides in didn’t get along with Germany geopolitically. There could be a severe data breach if Germany’s data requests got intercepted in a hostile environment.
Also, if your data is stored on a public cloud server, say AWS or Azure, Amazon or Microsoft has full rights to confiscate data under US law – regardless of where your company is based. Most companies that are building cloud infrastructure in public clouds are aware of this fact – and many are now looking for local alternatives.
All these powerful reasons for keeping data localized are driving the adoption of new technologies such as Edge Cloud computing – which is something we’ll discuss in our next blog. But all things considered, in the new norm of hybrid and public cloud the issue of compliance is one that all companies are now dealing with.
Ultimately, your data is your responsibility – but knowing exactly what’s needed to keep it under control is often tougher than it first appears.