IDC: Data Sovereignty and Compliance Issues Shaping IT Decisions

January 26, 2023

New survey results from International Data Corporation (IDC) show that data sovereignty and compliance are now an important factor in shaping IT selection and design decisions.

Almost half the respondents (48%) to IDC’s Cloud Pulse 2Q22 survey (n=1350) say that data sovereignty and industry compliance have factored highly in discussions about their future IT architectures. And just 4% of respondents believe their IT organizations will not be impacted by data sovereignty and compliance considerations.

Among organizations that expect their IT budgets to increase in the coming year, the vast majority believe that data sovereignty and industry compliance considerations will strongly influence service provider selection decisions and decisions about their primary datacenter environments.

"IDC expects data sovereignty and industry compliance considerations to be of increasing importance to decisions about the design, operation, and management of IT architectures, including the selection of cloud service providers," said Chris Drake, Senior Research Director, BuyerView Research at IDC. "This partly reflects the growing importance of regulation, including GDPR, which emphasizes the importance of personal data protection and provides specific rules about data storage and transfer."

Data sovereignty is largely unambiguous at this point with rules already in place within the EU and in other jurisdictions about data use, storage, and movement. The evolution of EU data regulation that started with GDPR in 2018 is being extended to the Data Governance Act. As a result, enterprises that operate in Europe need technology solutions that provide a holistic view of how data is collected, classified, processed, and stored to ensure data regulations are being met.