Quocirca recently had an interesting discussion with an
off-shore hosting and cloud company.
Jersey-based (as in the UK Channel Islands, not the US New Jersey)
Calligo is positioning itself as the right place to be for data - and for
running the applications that create and consume the data.
Why is this important?
Well, organisations are beginning to wake up to the fact that even when
a data centre is in a "friendly" country, there is still potentially high risks
to the intellectual property (IP) held within the data.
The US Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act (FISA) make those European companies that have looked into their possible
impact shudder. That a foreign power can
demand - and get - access to their data just because it is hosted by a company
in the US - or is in a facility anywhere in the world that is owned by a company
in the US - means that many are looking for alternative arrangements with
companies that can still offer a broad range of services, but backed with
better data security agreements that cannot be ridden roughshod over by the
regional government.
Calligo's view is that Jersey is highly controlled from a
data viewpoint. Although it is nominally
"in" the UK, it is actually a separate British Crown Dependency. This means that it is autonomous, makes its
own laws and operates outside of the reach of other country's legal systems -
including the UK. Sure, EU laws will
still apply when push comes to shove - but a European customer may be happier
with a Jersey/EU escalation than a <country>/EU/US three-way battle.
This means that data can be stored in a country where the
legal system is subject to fewer overall laws, is overseen by fewer people and
can be targeted to specific needs. Jersey has pedigree here with the way it has
dealt with financial services in its country.
Jersey is also well connected from a data viewpoint to both
the UK and the European mainland through multiple cables, and from these to the
rest of the world. Therefore, placing
applications and data in a commercial, secure facility on an island that is
part of the EU but is autonomous has many things going for it.
But, however well Jersey is connected to the rest of the
world, it cannot overcome its relative geographic isolation. When fast, low-latency response is needed, e.g. for transactional work in the US or in Japan - the
underlying latency can still be an issue.
Calligo recognises this, and is looking at where else in the world it
can set up similar facilities and meet the needs of organisations that want to
be assured of greater security for their data and therefore their intellectual
property.
The Cayman Islands are one option - they are well placed for
the south of the US, for Central America and for the major markets of the top
of South America. Although the Cayman Islands are a British Overseas Territory
with their own legal system, they come under the overall control of the UK and
have a Governor appointed by the Queen - but can still enact and follow laws that
make sense from a commercial viewpoint to the islands.
Calligo also includes a data ownership clause in its
agreements - the data always belongs to and is owned by the customer. Many cloud providers make no statements about
this - which can cause issues for the actual data owner. On top of this, Calligo says that it has a
special clause in its agreements, which make it clear that should the untoward
happen, the data has to be turned over to the customer (even by a business
administrator) - so making it easier for a customer to regain access to the
data and move it to another provider.
Similar approaches in other parts of the world could give
Calligo an interesting footprint for a global offering. With small, autonomous island states being
more likely to provide laws that are data friendly while still retaining strong
audit and overall data security capabilities, Calligo's offerings of IaaS, PaaS
and SaaS (for example, it hosts SugarCRM and other applications) combined with
the capability to use external cloud offerings where it makes sense (such as
Google Maps) will make sense to many organisations.
Overall, Calligo looks like an interesting company. For those who have worries about how their
data is secured not just from the baddies out there, but also from the
governments who are enacting ever more threatening laws around data access, the
use of Island nations as a home for data could be just as good as using them
for financial affairs.
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