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Comment by kryten | Hacker News Reader

The wider audience being the people who make the purchasing decisions...

I work in the financial sector in Europe and this HAS pretty much killed the cloud simply due to the uncertainty. People are in meetings right now working out how to move all their stuff off AWS etc rapidly before the people who pay the bills land it on the doorstep.

In fact it's killed datacenters that are US subsidiaries such as Rackspace as well. I had a conversation with a guy at Rackspace this morning and they actually recommended going to a local company over themselves.

The shit has literally hit the fan this time.

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>People are in meetings right now working out how to move all their stuff

I'm wondering why they didn't consider this scenario in the first place. That lets me question their expertise very much. Aren't they professionally paranoid enough? Then why do they run critical infrastructure?

They were informed. After all it's our job to inform them of the facts and let them make a decision, usually based on a tradeoff of risk perception (note not real risk rating) and cost.

Now risk is perceived to be higher, cost is a little more flexible.

Businesses don't necessarily operate in the best interests of their clients. The shareholders come first, then the clients and anything which takes from the bottom line is going to end up a risk tradeoff.

I post anonymously as I'm risk averse and don't necessarily agree with how businesses operate in this respect.

"I had a conversation with a guy at Rackspace this morning and they actually recommended going to a local company over themselves."

Errr... what?!

Yes this was Rackspace.

We were proposing moving our S3 stuff over to their OpenStack stuff for inevitable security reasons (we hold sensitive contract and financial data). We were told that they could make no guarantees directly so we'd be better off going with a "locally registered company".

If you call a non US subsidiary and ask them directly about their data handling policy with respect to the US, then you'll get the same answer. With FISA, they are required not to tell you as well.

Why would you assume a local company is any more secure?

A company based in Europe wouldn't be subject to US laws, which provides more certainty for their clients.

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