Thread

1. rishikeshs · 1789595308 · focus · HN ↗

   I think this is due to the data residency requirements in UAE. I'm working with a client in the health space and the government requirements requires me to store data only in UAE! Tried with AWS but they were not allowing any new instances and I had to go with Azure.

   1. dannyobrien · 1789599969 · focus · HN ↗

      Hi, I'm from the past. When countries in the 2010s -- especially Western countries -- started seeing data residency requirements as an acceptable aspect of national policies, as opposed to a weird authoritarian thing that only China and Russia imposed on their citizens, we[1] spent a bunch of time explaining to their lawmakers that having geographical redundancy was a good thing, actually, and that you should stop insisting on where the data resided for jurisdictional purposes and start talking about where administrative access and encryption keys lived.

      [1] OK, "we" here is probably just me -- it was one of those things where the chances of successfully convincing anyone was so small, and the commercial advantages of just nodding along, and then changing your product offering was so great, that really very few people raised it or had reason to. But somebody had to!

      1. wand3r · 1789602743 · focus · HN ↗

         This is a very engineer-centric view. I studied economics in school, so an analogy in that realm is ironically how all countries should specialize and raise the PPC curve. The reality of the situation was that in 2010 not many people understood how powerful big data actually was. Data sovereignty is actually quite logical when you consider the scale and power of not only the company, but the US as a whole. I can assure you that lawmakers were not thinking about efficient disaster recovery plans or back ups when they made the laws. You can also create reasonably diversified data silos within a country.

         As an aside, it is quite crazy the world we live in. I am with the majority where I expected Amazon to be more redundant, but I still marvel at the assumption that a US dev can spin up multiple redundant and data sovereign servers in dozens of countries with efficient caching, failover and redundancy (enough to survive an earthquake or targeted missile attack) from their own home. Even a few hours of outage in a foreign country is considered unacceptable.

         1. dannyobrien · 1789606341 · focus · HN ↗

            See my other answers, but briefly: no, they were not thinking about this, which is why we were raising it. I guess the counterintuitive point we were trying to get across is that with most things, the best way to keep it safe from being lost is to put it in a known place, and lock it away. But for data, the strategy -- for that scenario -- is to keep it in a lot of places, with heterogenous defense strategies. This is for data loss, of course, not access or surveillance or unlawful processing. But there is a cost as well as a benefit to deliberately limiting your options.

            (I can feel someone saying "but surely having redundancy in one country is good enough, so I'll just say that I know relatively sane people who try to have hemispheric redundancy in their data, and also you never know when two different-in-every-quality-but one locations will suffer from the same disaster. Floods; heat-waves; national protests and strikes. It's surprising how often rare things happen!)

            On your second point, it really is crazy. And also amazing that this is a capability that is -- or should be -- available to anyone in the world, not just in the US, and not just devs. Hopefully without also having to think about their data suddenly finding itself in a warzone.

            1. simoncion · 1789608709 · focus · HN ↗

               > This is for data loss, of course, not access or surveillance or unlawful processing.

               This is why the minority of politicians who actually know about how this stuff works worry about where the data resides for jurisdictional purposes. If the government where the data resides can compel the folks who have physical and/or logical access to the physical machines that contain that data to give them access to that data, then that's game over for you.

               «But you just don't permit that sort of breach to happen!» you might say. To which I reply "Yeah, right.".

               Substantial physical separation of datacenters is very important, but the politics and policies of the location housing the data cannot be ignored.

               1. dannyobrien · 1789625335 · focus · HN ↗

                  I mean, in those rooms I was arguing over the best policies to prevent access and surveillance and unlawful processing, and what the potential cost-benefit analysis was. And what I was arguing against was an assumption that physically compelling all companies -- or worse, all citizens -- to keep their data within the borders of the host country, would protect you from these problems.

                  We'd have to explain that if the data was physically in Brazil, but hosted by a U.S. company, that would not stop that company from accessing that data remotely -- unless you specified that. We'd have to also explain that if you were intended to defend against US mass surveillance of non-US persons by the US intelligence services, intelligence services and SIGINT are univerally almost defined by their broad remit to target foreign nations on their own territory in violation of local law. And, finally, if you intended to use the prohibiting the movement of of data as a sanction against companies to punish them for violating data protection standards, as pre-GDPR law in the EU had as an ultimate last resort, and the GDPR often ends up relying on as a last resort, you would find that multinationals are more capable of putting up servers in your home territory and continuing to serve your citizens than they are of substantially changing their practices regarding data processing.

                  I don't want to sound nihilistic about this -- regulations can exist in these areas. But it's those politics and policies of the institutions with control over the data that are the most important part of this: not where the bits are kept. Especially when those bits are encrypted, and the keys and access controls are elsewhere.

                  1. simoncion · 1789651898 · focus · HN ↗

                     > But it's those politics and policies of the institutions with control over the data that are the most important part of this: not where the bits are kept. Especially when those bits are encrypted, and the keys and access controls are elsewhere.

                     Nah. Policies prohibit rule-followers from accessing data that you don't want accessed. Such policies are very important. But if you give your adversary effectively-unlimited physical access to the hardware where the bits are kept, that's game over. If you don't trust the governors of a region to honor the "don't tamper with this hardware" gentleman's agreement, and you very seriously care about preventing unauthorized access to the data that that hardware stores and processes, then you don't put that hardware in that region.

                     To point to a real-world example of this, there's not going to be an AWS Top Secret Cloud region in China, Russia, or -say- North Korea.

         2. bonestamp2 · 1789607614 · focus · HN ↗

            > You can also create reasonably diversified data silos within a country.

            I generally agree, although if a small country only had half a dozen or so redundant data centers then it would be relatively easy for a powerful adversary to wipe out all of the data centers and potentially have a significant economic impact on that country.

            Having a backup data center in an ally country might make sense. Kind of like how I keep an encrypted backup hard drive at my parents house. Whenever I go to visit I pull it out and backup my laptop there too.

         3. dotancohen · 1789629508 · focus · HN ↗

              > I can assure you that lawmakers were not thinking about efficient disaster recovery plans or back ups when they made the laws.
            

            That's why the input of actual specialists in a field should be the one drafting the policies. I'm glad that professional lawmakers exist, I personally couldn't draw up a proper par if I had to, but they are not and can not be specialists in every field.

            1. snapcaster · 1789653558 · focus · HN ↗

               No, because "actual specialists" like to pretend power and politics don't exist. If you're a leader of a sovereign nation and let all your data be stored in US datacenters you're either stupid or corrupt
            2. IAmBroom · 1789664330 · focus · HN ↗

               You are describing the US regulatory landscape, up until Trump's SCROTUS revoked the Chevron deference in 2024.

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