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Cloud Buying Behavior In The Post-Snowden Era

This article is more than 9 years old.

Many cloud vendors predicted that Edward Snowden's whistle blowing about widespread NSA surveillance would fundamentally change the technology landscape in general, and the cloud computing landscape in particular. The theory went that customers, wary of their most intimate corporate data being perused by US agencies, would flock to non US cloud vendors to give them security over their data. Non US vendors such as OnApp and GreenQloud, along with regional service providers such as telcos, either publicly or privately had a view of increasing levels of interest in their services as an alternative to AWS, Google, Microsoft and the other global cloud vendors.

But while there have been a never ending list of press releases from one or another non US based vendor saying just how worried customers really are, the incumbent vendors - from AWS to Microsoft, from Rackspace to Google , don't look to be suffering from any kind of customer mass exodus.

In the absence of hard statistics, it was hard to look at this vendor posturing as anything more than PR spin. So in like of that it was interesting to see some survey results from NTT Communications, the Japanese based, but globally operating, communications and IT vendor that suggested that in fact there is empirical proof of a change in buyer behavior post-Snowden. Some interesting key findings from the report:

  • 88% of ICT decision-makers report that they are changing their cloud buying behavior as a result of Snowden's leaks
  • Only 5% of respondents believe location does not matter at all when it comes to storing company data
  • 31%of  ICT decision-makers are moving data to locations where the business knows it will be safe
  • 82% of all ICT decision-makers globally agree with proposals by Angela Merkel for separating data networks

The survey was relatively small, 1000 respondents from France, Germany, Hong Kong the UK and the US were polled. As such it's not a definitive statement of general industry trends, but is indicative of some concerns that customers have. The survey also exposed factors around the status of existing cloud contracts and increasing due diligence.

While it would be easy to state that these survey results mark a fundamental shift in the way the industry works, I can't help but see them as less than that. True, some customers are being more circumspect in their deliberations and potentially it's also lengthening the time-to-convert that cloud vendors are seeing, but this doesn't feel like either a generally occurring, or a long term industry shift.

IT professionals tend to be a fairly pragmatic bunch and, while they realize that the Snowden revelations are certainly something to thing about, they're unlikely to forego the very real benefits that a global cloud vendor can bring to their business for some theoretical or potential risk of surveillance.

I spend time talking to regional cloud vendors and my advice is generally the same. At best, Snowden has given you a short term positive blip but you fundamentally need to find ways to deliver a differentiated service beyond simple articulating the "we're safe from the NSA" story. Many vendors are getting this message and rarely, if ever, taking the NSA-proof line. This is in my mind a smart strategy and I'm concerned by the vendors whose single point of difference seems to be the fact they're not based in the US.