Founder of the Internet Infrastructure Coalition (I2C), David Snead, has revealed that the US is facing an avoidance from Data Center customers who are moving infrastructure in other sites owing to “data sovereignty concerns” raised by the NSA surveillance disclosures.
According to Data Center Knowledge, “Our members are seeing a very real shift in putting data outside the U.S. rather than inside the U.S.,” said Mr. Snead, whose group includes more than 100 companies in the hosting and data center business. “The NSA disclosures have undermined worldwide confidence in U.S. infrastructure,” he is reported to have said.
Mr. Snead isn’t the only one to believe so. Back in July, researchers at the New America Foundation had reported that U.S. tech enterprises were likely to lose business to foreign competitors if the National Security Agency’s surveillance on customers remained unchecked.
The report explained that the NSA spying could damage the $150 billion industry for cloud computing services, citing concerns from tech giants like Microsoft and Cisco. Much hasn’t changed since then.
Mr. Snead cites the example of ‘a large hosting company in Switzerland that reported a 45-percent increase in business in the wake of the revelations of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.’ A member of I2C has reported that it used to get 70 percent of its new business from overseas customers, but that now has dropped to 35 percent.
Amazon Web Services has launched their a new AWS EU (Frankfurt) region, addressing the customers’ want for content privacy.
Although US isn’t the only country carrying out such ‘snooping’ exercises, it is however a key player in Internet infrastructure. Mr. Snead said, “The vast majority of data transfer traffic touches the United States,” said Snead. “The U.S. remains an enormous market for the data center industry.”
Identifying part of the problem the I2C points out that the ‘issue is the secret nature of information requests by the NSA and other agencies.’ Authorities bar service providers from revealing whether they’ve received classified requests for user data. Asking for a more transparent approach the I2C believes that ‘companies should be able to explain how the process works.’ and ‘disclose the number of requests they have received from the government.’
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