Continental Drift: Is Digital Sovereignty Splitting Global Data Centers?

It has been one of the great unresolved debates of this decade: If data, from a legal perspective, should be subject to the laws and regulations of the country in which it was created, then should a cloud platform hosting data from multiple countries be partitioned? Compartmentalized? Segregated? Or should the infrastructure itself become divided and distributed among geographical territories? In recent months, it would appear that politicians and public officials are seeking to stake claims in territories they don't quite comprehend.

"Germany has a claim to digital sovereignty," stated that country's minister for the economy, Peter Altmaier, in a speech last July. "That's why it's important to us that cloud solutions are not just created in the US."

Turnkey Balkanization
A number of phrases have been used interchangeably in recent months that are anything but. Their confusion with one another, whether intentionally or innocently, has yielded international consequences. The most daunting of these has been the onset of fault lines between the world's IT trading blocs.

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