A lot of people are saying this is due to latency, but it's really not.
Is it any surprise that any country wouldn't want their data stored on US servers? Canada does the same. The USA just wants to eat it's cake and have it too.
That being said, the Australian Government (particularly Department of Defence) also doesn't allow government data on any cloud server, even those hosted inside Australia. These US cloud providers are just trying to drum up business by claiming a bias to loosen regulations, but there is no bias, just good old security policy. Tight security policy, true, but it's their data and they can direct their own employees how they want it handled.
Eventually though the walls will come down unless the functionality offered by the cloud can be duplicated on government servers, but I do think more needs to be done for security guarantees in the cloud to mature first. I have no qualms putting my own data on some 2 week old startups servers, but more serious info probably needs a little bit more consideration about where it can go.
Some hosting decision are latency/throughput based; when working on hosting full HD streaming video we couldn't get a reliable stream from anywhere outside Australia (for Australian viewers)
This video content was all publicly accessible, so there was no risk of it being seized.
Is it any surprise that any country wouldn't want their data stored on US servers? Canada does the same. The USA just wants to eat it's cake and have it too.
That being said, the Australian Government (particularly Department of Defence) also doesn't allow government data on any cloud server, even those hosted inside Australia. These US cloud providers are just trying to drum up business by claiming a bias to loosen regulations, but there is no bias, just good old security policy. Tight security policy, true, but it's their data and they can direct their own employees how they want it handled.
Eventually though the walls will come down unless the functionality offered by the cloud can be duplicated on government servers, but I do think more needs to be done for security guarantees in the cloud to mature first. I have no qualms putting my own data on some 2 week old startups servers, but more serious info probably needs a little bit more consideration about where it can go.