For data storage, India trusts global service providers over local: Cisco

79 per cent of all corporate respondents in the Cisco's latest survey said that data protection laws have a positive effect

Indian organisations prefer their data to be stored within the country but do not trust local data protection service providers, according to Cisco's 2023 Data Privacy Benchmark Study. The Economic Times reported that around 88 per cent of the participants of the study said they trusted their data being stored within the Indian territory.

However, when asked about who they trust their data with, 90 per cent of the respondents said global service providers were their first choice, the report added.

"When viewing these two statements together, it seems that while organisations would ideally like to keep their data local, they still prefer and trust a global provider over a local provider," the study said.

"Of course, their ideal solution would be to get both - a local instance that retains the data locally set up by a global provider," it added.

The report also highlighted the significance of privacy legislation in holding organisations accountable for how they manage users' data. It said the count of countries with privacy legislation in place has gone up from 145 last year to 157 now.  

About 79 per cent of all corporate respondents in the report said that these laws had a positive effect, even though complying with these laws involves significant cost and effort on the part of the organisations. 

"Many governments and organisations are putting in place data localisation requirements, which force data to be kept within a country or region...To many, these requirements seem like a good idea at first, but our research indicates this view does not hold up once costs, security, privacy, and other trade-offs are considered," the report stated.

The Government of India recently released the draft of the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022, proposing cross-border data flow.