Who can recall the first pop/rock performance that played at the Live Aid concerts back in 1985? The first act to kick off the London leg of the massive charity gig with estimated audience of 1.9 billion people was denim clad British rock boogie outfit Status Quo. They kicked off the set with their signature tune “Rockin’ All Over the World” penned by John Fogerty. The performance was one of the largest satellite link-ups and television broadcasts of all time and the logistics in beaming the concert worldwide must have been monumental.

Quo’s opening song name got me thinking about the global challenges organizations face as they advance their cloud first and multi-cloud strategies. Entrust nShield as a Service hardware security modules (HSMs) are used by customers who want to tap into high assurance cryptographic services without taking up datacenter real estate and tying up skilled staff to maintain them. nShield as a Service provides a scalable, flexible, subscription-based solution for generating, accessing and protecting cryptographic keys.  Launched a couple of years ago, it has proved extremely successful for existing on premises HSM customers, and equally appealing to brand new customers who are seeking the ease and flexibility it provides.

Advancing their worldwide rollout strategy, Entrust is launching a couple of new datacenters this month in Frankfurt and Munich. They will complement the existing service hosted in two US datacenters, and two UK datacenters. And it’s not stopping there. Entrust have datacenters going live coming soon in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia.

So why more datacenters in more regions you might ask? There are two main reasons. The first reason is latency (the discernible delay in communications between sender and receiver as distance increases). The Live Aid gig would have experienced plenty of latency issues given the approximate two second delay in satellite link up from London to the USA. Latency is one of the reasons customers’ may want to run applications or services in different parts of the globe.

The second reason is data sovereignty mandates. These are typically government mandates that legally forbid data being hosted or processed outside of the geography of the country or region. Campaigner Max Schrems hit the headlines last year when he contested the legality of the movement of data from the EU to US by a well-known social media company. His case went to the Court of Justice of the European Union in July 2020, ruling that “data controllers or processors that intend to transfer data based on standard contract clauses must ensure that the data subject is granted a level of protection essentially equivalent to that guaranteed by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (CFR) – if necessary with additional measures to compensate for gaps in protection of third country legal systems. Failing that, operators must suspend the transfer of personal data outside the EU.” Source: CJEU judgment in the Schrems II case here.

Germany also has its own legislation in addition to the Schrems II case. Since 2017 there is Bundesdatenschutzgesetz-Neu abbreviated to BDSG-new legislation which calls out the privacy rights of German citizens and how their data should be managed.

In Australia the Digital Transformation Agency has recently rolled out a new Hosting Certification Framework, which reflects the Australian Government’s concerns regarding data sovereignty. The framework will be rolled out over the next year to providers of hosting and related datacenters services to Australian agencies.

In essence organizations operating in countries and regions around the world need to be mindful of legislation concerning the storage and processing of data. Using cloud services without the levers to restrict the geography could be problematic. The new Entrust datacenters located in the EU and Australia will no doubt help organizations processing data in those regions.

With four new datacenters rolling out, offering nShield as a Service give us truly global coverage.  Why not let Entrust help you in your migration to the cloud. In the words of Status Quo or more accurately John Fogerty, “Oh here we are and here we are and here we go, All aboard and we’re hitting the road, Here we go, rockin’ all over the world….. with nShield as a Service. I couldn’t say it any better myself! Learn more about nShield as a Service, and how it can help you in your cloud adoption strategy.