Global providers seen safer to store data locally: study

The study also revealed that privacy legislation plays an important role in enabling governments to hold organisations accountable for how they manage personal data, and 157 countries (up from 145 last year) now have privacy laws in place.

Even though complying with these laws involves significant effort and cost, 79% of all corporate respondents said privacy laws have had a positive impact.

“Many governments and organisations are putting in place data localisation requirements, which force data to be kept within a country or region. To many, these requirements seem like a good idea at first, but our research indicates this view does not hold up once costs, security, privacy, and other tradeoffs are considered,” the survey report said.

This comes at a time when the Indian Government recently released the draft of the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022, which proposes cross border data flow.

In the Cisco 2022 Consumer Privacy Survey, 78% of consumers initially said they thought data localisation was a good idea, but support dropped to 41% when including the added cost for goods and services.

Discover the stories of your interest

According to 89% of the organisations in this year’s survey, data localisation does add significant cost to their operations. Results from this current study show that the vast majority (88%) of respondents believe that their data would be inherently safer if it is only stored within their country or region.”Remarkably, an even larger number (90%) also said that a global provider, operating at scale, can better protect the data compared to local providers. When viewing these two statements together, it seems that while organisations would ideally like to keep their data local, they still prefer and trust a global provider over a local provider,” the report said.

“Of course, their ideal solution would be to get both – a local instance that retains the data locally set up by a global provider,” it added.

While data localisation is often driven by national laws and attitudes, there was not substantial variation across respondents in different geographies. The percentage of respondents saying “a global provider can better protect data compared to a local provider” was between 75% and 100% in all 26 geographies of respondents.

In its recommendations, Cisco said, “Consider the costs and consequences of data localization and recognise that local providers may be more expensive and degrade the functionality, privacy, and security of your data than global providers operating at scale.”