Crown in the Clouds: A Canadian Data Sovereignty Crisis

摘要

Cloud Service Providers (CSP) offer the opportunity for individuals, companies, and governments to rapidly leverage current capabilities dynamically and with great elasticity. At the time of writing, unlike the U.S., Canada does not have large sovereign CSPs with global presence. Although one may debate overall cost effectiveness and value of moving electronic data and computational workloads to the cloud, it is difficult to ignore the international drive for the adoption of cloud and cloud services. The Government of Canada's (GC) use of cloud capacities should not be driven by technical and economic desires or requirements. Like decision making in warfare, the complexities of international law and politics should be considered. This paper reflects upon the lessons learned from the U.S. "Cloud First" policy and discusses the challenges and risks of hosting sovereign Canadian electronic data and workloads in the cloud, concluding that is unclear if the GC will be able to claim data sovereignty even if its data is stored in Canada using a global CSP.