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Apple's data centre investment highlights trend towards regionalised data storage, says expert

24 Feb 2015, 3:58 pm

Apple's investment in two new European data centres highlights European companies' increasing appetite for more localised storage of their data, an expert has said.

Earlier this week, Apple announced that it would spend €1.7 billion in building and operating new data centres in Ireland and Denmark.

The data centres are to be powered exclusively by renewable energy and will "power Apple's online services", including its App Store, iTunes Store, Maps and Siri services, Apple said. The data centres will each measure 166,000 square metres and are expected to be operational in 2017, it said.

Data protection law expert Marc Dautlich of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com, said Apple was following other technology companies' lead by building data storage facilities in Europe.

"There are practical reasons why technology providers look to locate their data centres closer to the third party servers they are exchanging information with, including to reduce latency – the delay in the time it takes for data to be processed and travel across a network. However, another main factor in decisions to locate data centres in Europe is EU data protection laws.”

“All the major US tech providers are offering or appear to be considering offering regional EU hosting of data, in recognition of increasing requests from EU businesses and government for more localised storage of the personal data they are responsible for. There have been concerns about what access foreign authorities have to data stored on servers in their jurisdiction, which has compliance implications for businesses operating in the EU that elect to outsource data hosting to third parties based outside of the European Economic Area,” he said.

“An ongoing case between the US government and Microsoft could determine whether US data hosts that store personal data on servers outside of the US must provide US law enforcement agencies with access to that information upon receipt of a warrant. If the US courts support the US government's view that Microsoft is wrong to withhold access to personal data stored in Ireland, it will be less relevant in future what jurisdiction the data resides in and more about whether the company hosting data is based in the US. Apple and a number of other US tech companies are supporting Microsoft in the case,” Dautlich said.

In 2013, cloud provider Salesforce announced it would build a data centre in the UK after admitting its then lack of data storage facilities in the UK had hindered its efforts to win UK government IT contracts.