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.