A factor that I feel is more important but was sort of glossed over during the article is the fact that it is a competitive disadvantage NOT to do this. The av

A factor that I feel is more important but was sort of glossed over during the article is the fact that it is a competitive disadvantage NOT to do this. The average person is becoming increasingly security conscious, and so are small and medium sized businesses. I seem to remember that Azure was having a really hard time selling to an international audience because foreigners thought the data would be vulnerable in the hands of the US government. As someone who doesn't live in the US and works in consulting the few years post Snowden were quite curious, with clients who previously didn't mind using cloud solutions like Amazon S3 actively refusing any architecture choices which would lead to having their data stored in the US, even if it meant greater expense. I really do believe that not taking an approach similar to this where we use End to End encryption and companies minimise their access over their customers data as much as humanly possible can and does lead to lost business.