Data protection restrictions on personal information held by the public sector will drive the demand for in-country data hosting, predicts Claranet UK managing director, Michel Robert.
Current data protection laws state that personal information held by the public sector cannot be hosted outside the UK. Unless application developers can guarantee in-country hosting, this means they will face restrictions in the type of data that they can handle.
Robert says: “Because of the buying power that public sector organisations carry, the sector has significant influence over how the UK IT industry evolves. Already, following the launch of the government’s CloudStore in February this year, we are seeing an increased level of interest in the in-country hosting feature offered by Claranet’s Virtual Data Centre (VDC).”
The CloudStore is a government website designed to make the procurement and operation of cloud services simple for public sector organisations. As one of the registered suppliers, Claranet’s VDC service provides a key feature of cloud that public sector departments in the UK require - in-country data hosting.
Many large, global cloud providers do not have data centres in the UK, which means that they are not eligible to provide cloud services to the public sector. Managed service providers such as Claranet, with UK-based data centres, and who are part of the CloudStore, are eligible. Claranet’s offering to the public sector is VDC, which enables businesses of all sizes to benefit from cloud computing and self-provision network, compute and storage resource on demand.
Robert continues: “As use of the CloudStore increases, we predict that many more cloud providers will offer in-country data hosting features for their services.
“The increasing adoption of cloud in the public sector will have a significant influence on the marketplace as a whole, proving advantageous to cloud organisations such as ourselves, who have developed appropriate services to meet the needs of the public sector.”