Why do we not see an exodus from US Clouds yet?
It is interesting. The argument that data sovereignty is not possible in US Clouds for EU-based organizations has been obvious since “the cloud” started.
It is a bad idea to put your precious data in the hands of a company that is under jurisdiction of another country.
Why? Well, because how will you assert that the legal and political development of that other country will align with those of your own country? And how do you assert that the laws aligns between the two countries in the first place? You can't, do you? For one, you need to be a lawyer to try to do that for real, and second, you can't predict the future.
Transatlantic Data Privacy Framework
That is why the EU has created this deal with the US called the Transatlantic Data Privacy Framework, most often DPF for short. This deal makes the US part of the countries on the adequacy decisions list. An adequacy decision is made after extensive legal research conducted by the EU to make sure that a non EU country is compliant with the GDPR. But, it does not necessarily mean the flow of any data for the countries on that list. And for the US it was necessary to create a bilateral deal before any data could flow. And the first deal failed. And then the next. And now we have a deal that does not seem to have changed anything. And Trump has weakened the deal by firing judges from the PCLOB so that board can't operate.
And when it comes to the most common “other country” we use for digital services, the US, we actually know full well that they have laws that target data collection from non US-citizens and organizations. And that US government agencies have the right to extract data from the biggest services from the US. These are facts.
The problem, at least to me, is that we have taken the legal side of things when it comes to digital services to lightly. I include myself in “we”.
What has changed?
The future is always impossible to predict. And many of us hoped that Trump would not become president again. That he would, no one could have known for sure.
However we've known what he wanted to achieve if he got to power again. This has been outlined in the Project 2025 doctrine and we have the first term as a nice piece of evidence as well. And he has spoken about tariffs like for ever. And we know that he is an authoritarian and that he wants to put “America first”.
So, how much evidence and experiences of losing control do we need before we plan for the exit from US clouds? How many arguments about how hard it is to migrate do we have the time to listen to?
In short, nothing has really changed. It has always been a legal gamble at best and a legal disaster more likely to put your data in US cloud services.
And, I have not even brought up the NIS-2 directive yet. It puts even more demand for being in control.
What do do?
To conclude, it might be harder for some to migrate from US cloud services. But in general I think the issue is more about taking a step back. With infrastructure as code tools and configuration management tools that exist to day, it is not really a technical issue. It is more an issue of accepting to use a multitude of providers. To me, that is a good thing. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Today it seems most everybody are putting all their eggs in at the most three different baskets.
And speaking of the hardship to exit US cloud services. If you conclude that it's so hard to exit your US cloud services that you would like to not do an exit. That in and of itself tells you how severe your situation is.
Some will say that we can't predict the future in our own country either. And that is true. But at least, speaking from a Swedish perspective, I have a vote in Sweden. We have some kind of agency. With US providers we have literally none.
In this post I have only talked about legal ramifications and some risk management. There is so many more things to consider regarding control over your organizations data. I hope to, even though no one have asked for it, to write some more about this topic.
My conclusion is that if you are in the position to choose a cloud provider go for European one and preferably a provider from the country you operate in. For multi-national deployments you need to make some more choices though. A provider that is from your own country will be easier to have a relationship with and to make risk assessments for.
For you who are already knee deep in US cloud providers, simply start where you stand. Perform an inventory of what you use and what alternatives there are. The create an high level exit plan and go from there.
Joakim Durehed