‘India wants to have all its cloud data within national borders in the future’

According to Reuters, India may require that cloud data generated by the country must also be stored in Indian data centers. That would mean that companies like Amazon and Microsoft would have to expand in the country, but energy costs are particularly high there.

Reuters says it has seen a draft proposal from a committee that is considering India’s cloud policy. The additional costs of energy and the migrations themselves would in turn mean that the costs of cloud provider services would rise, which in turn could potentially be passed on to Indian businesses and consumers.

One of the motivations for the possible law is that authorities can access the data much more easily when necessary for an investigation. According to the concept, there will be USD 7 billion in cloud services in India by 2022, twice as much as is the case today.

An anonymous Indian executive at a global technology company called the proposals “protectionism” to Reuters and said “we are going back in time when it comes to globalization.” The proposal also includes recommendations to find more suitable data center locations, create financial incentives and create tax breaks for cloud providers.

So-called data sovereignty is becoming an increasingly important issue for countries as people and businesses store more information in the cloud. For example, Europe does not oblige that cloud data of its citizens and companies must always be stored in Europe, but does, for example, impose certain conditions on the storage of its data in the US, for example, in the form of the EU US Privacy Shield framework. A while ago, in 2014, Google said it didn’t see anything in local cloud data storage and Microsoft did.