Note the following disclaimer: I will not….and I repeat WILL NOT be speaking of any regulations in this blog that either start with GD or end with PR. Not gonna do it I tell ya.
We have now moved on to my second favourite topic: Sovereign Data Walls©. What is a Sovereign Data Wall© you might ask? Before I shamelessly plug my next in-development blog series (very cleverly entitled “The Exate Cross Border Data Transfer Blog Trilogy”), a tip of the hat to Sonal, who came up with the idea to trademark the Sovereign Data Wall© phrase a few years ago. It has been a bit of a social experiment, but the name has actually caught on!! Google it and you will see…
ANYWAY….I digress. Back to the reason why we are all here: The latest erection (of a Sovereign Data Wall©). What you will learn from “The Exate Cross Border Data Transfer Blog Trilogy” (shameless plug number 2) is about Sovereign Data Walls© and Data Localisation. The new Vietnam regulation is a prime example of Data Localisation, but with a refreshing lemony twist.
In a super summary, Data Localization requires that an individual’s data must be processed in a specific country. Let’s go to the rapid-fire round (with bullets of course) to look at what is happening in Vietnam:
On June 12, 2018, Vietnam passed a new law which requires Data Localisation (go-live date of Jan 1, 2019)
In simple terms, you need to store all of the data about Vietnamese residents in Vietnam
No more outsourcing the data storage to Singapore. No more anonymous Cloud installs in random locations. Stored in Vietnam, inside the Sovereign Data Walls©.
Hmmm. But I need to store all of the data in Vietnam then how am to do that?! Here is a suggestion: Get out the hammer and saw…you are going to be building data centers!
What else is covered in the new law? Was it enacted to protect the PII of people like the famous EU Regulation of which we do not speak in this blog? In short…NO.
The law grants the Government full authority to monitor on-line activity
IT firms must turn over user data to the Government upon written request
No fake news is allowed, you can’t change history and you cannot offend or otherwise cheese off people (ahem…I think “people” means “the Government”)
Why do I care?
This is all nice – but why do I care? Well, you will care a lot if you are doing business in Vietnam, as your costs go up as the Sovereign Data Walls go up
Are there a lot of customers in Vietnam? Yup….about 93 million of them. This is more than the UK (66 million), France (67 million) and Germany (83 million). 65 million people in Vietnam have internet and 53 million people have Facebook accounts
You know what Facebook is doing? Building data centers – that costs money.
What can I do about it?
Why not speak to Exate? They specialize in Sovereign Data Walls© and it is a heck of a lot cheaper than building data centers!
Exate Tech: Protect the Data – Avoid the Builders