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U.S. Data Center Hosting Suffers from NSA Impact

Twenty-five percent of respondents are planning to move their data outside the U.S., and security is the top concern of 96 percent of those surveyed.

Would you give your nosy neighbors your medical records, correspondence and emails for safekeeping? Well neither would the rest of the world, if that nosy neighbor was the National Security Agency.

The revelations of NSA spying and the cooperation of American companies in that spying has put a kink in the hose of the U.S. data center hosting business, and has the potential to change the face of cloud computing if users demand their data be stored in a specific location (outside the U.S., for example.)

A survey of 300 potential data center customers by Canadian-based hosting provider Peer 1 found that most companies said the U.S. was still the most popular location for data hosting, second only to their own countries, but privacy concerns are growing after the NSA scandals. Twenty-five percent of respondents, for example, were planning to move their data outside the U.S., and security is the top concern of 96 percent of those surveyed -- so much so that nearly 70 percent of respondents agreed that they would sacrifice performance to ensure data sovereignty.

Wayne E. Hanson served as a writer and editor with e.Republic from 1989 to 2013, having worked for several business units including Government Technology magazine, the Center for Digital Government, Governing, and Digital Communities. Hanson was a juror from 1999 to 2004 with the Stockholm Challenge and Global Junior Challenge competitions in information technology and education.