It can be tough for the most progressive organizations to keep up with technology these days. The challenge is even harder for governments where politics, deliberation, and bureaucracy rule the day. Standards, norms, and regulation always lag behind the market curve, especially in IT. In the US, for example, there are no comprehensive, consent-based data privacy laws on the national level. Until that changes in the coming years businesses will continue to struggle with uncertainty and technological missteps

You can’t have customers in the e-commerce world without collecting personal data. Even processing a credit card for an online purchase using a guest account requires you to collect some personal information and hold it for a certain period of time. When you collect personal information, you’re required to comply with data protection regulations that apply to that information, such as CPRA, LGDP, and GDPR. And ignorance of the law is not an excuse for not complying with the law.

Have you ever wondered where your data really goes when you send it to the cloud? If you followed the bits, there is a good chance that you would find your scientific research, shopping carts, and personal emails on a hard drive in the world’s largest data depot, inside northern Virginia’s Data Center Alley.