Stampede!

It’s becoming painfully clear that your business data—and your customer data—is not safe in the hands of American companies. Just like you would not want the company you depend on to be run out of Moscow, Tehran, or Beijing.

For anyone who has not been paying attention over the past few months: Elon Musk, along with a group of young hackers, is trying to gain access to all data from government organizations using AI, supposedly to sniff-out “waste.” To do this, they are hoovering up every bit of data they can find lying around and put them on poorly secured systems (which has already been shown), and they’re firing anyone whose face they don’t like or whose role they don’t understand—including the people who safeguard nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, the big tech companies are tripping over themselves to cozy up to the those in power (for example, look how fast Google Maps started referring to the Gulf of America instead of the Gulf of Mexico).

The U.S. government is already trying to pressure companies outside the U.S. into following its “policies,” demanding they shut down diversity and inclusion programs—even though it’s been proven that such programs improve business performance. In a political climate like this, you do not want a, desperate to please, American company to casually hand over your data to a rogue tech overlord.

Aside from being immoral, going along with this surrender is simply bad business. We are already seeing the signs: one dating app’s radio advertising that your profile will not be stored with an American company.

The U.S. government has a long history of helping its domestic companies by covertly gathering intel on foreign competitors. But now, the CIA is no longer even needed for this —corporate secrets can just be funneled directly to regime-aligned companies.

Even if your customers are not (yet) demanding to keep their data safe—even if European legislation would not require it—it is still just good business to secure your own data. Until recently, simply proving your data was stored on European servers was enough to meet those legal requirements. But that is no longer the case as Washington is pushing for maximum control. In that context, data in Dublin is suddenly just as exposed as data in New York—and therefore no longer safe.

So yes, you want to get out of reach of these greedy claws. But cloud migration is not something companies are exactly thrilled about. Once you have built anything slightly complex in the cloud, moving such a deployment is a full-on Project—with a capital P. It is already a major task to switch environments within Azure, let alone move to an entirely different (European) provider—which, you now want to do. These kinds of migrations easily turn into multi-year efforts. Any competent management team should already be developing a plan, because these questions will come up—at the next shareholders’ meeting, if not sooner.

And if you are going to go through all that effort anyway, and you are forced to look for alternatives to the oh-so-convenient catalog of standard components in the Google, Amazon, and Azure clouds, suddenly you have the chance to make better strategic decisions too.

Never waste a good crisis

This crisis is a huge opportunity for strategic innovation. This “must-do” can be used to  achieve structurally lower cloud costs—or a chance to serve a new market cost-effectively. Finding such creative opportunity just happens to be my specialty.

If your company is called Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, and you’re in senior management, you would be extremely foolish not to see this coming. These companies could avoid the coming stampede for the emergency exits by moving quickly and visibly to separate their U.S. legal dependencies for customers in those in Europe and the rest of the world. And no, that does is not just shuffling a few dotted lines on the org chart. It means introducing entirely new organizational and technical structures—while continuing to serve existing customers.

But the longer they wait, the further along their (large) clients will already be with their own plans and actions to eliminate the risk being dependent on American companies pose. And even if they eventually do make that split—will anyone truly believe a new “Microsoft Europe” is really independent from Washington?