[jszymborski]

Health data can reside within your hospital's network. Government data within your government's network. Etc,...

I think the point is that your doctor or civil servant or local sushi shop shouldn't have to reach to AWS/GCP/Oracle each time they want to look up an MRI or building permit or loyalty points card status.

"local" is a relative term here.

[moi2388]

You don’t want hospitals to share data in case you are in another city and have to go to the hospital?

[willtemperley]

The data should reside exactly where they’re needed and nowhere else. For the UK NHS that’s probably in a UK data centre run by a UK company. Not AWS.

The fundamental problem with SaaS and pure server side applications is we do not know where the data are. With local first we can verify data locality.

[reeredfdfdf]

Here in Finland our government decided that best place to store national election related data (including the votes) is AWS data center in Sweden.

Looking forward to Jeff deciding which party wins next year!

[moi2388]

Sounds good on paper. But now 2 additional healthcare providers need my data, and my data is now in 3 locations.

Or we do this centrally, ie cloud, and only need a single security implementation and audit.

The problem isn’t the cloud, it’s private cloud by foreign companies with zero consequences for failures.

[flumpcakes]

Unfortunately the American companies are using their monopolies to price out everyone else. You're now in a situation where it's harder and harder to find people in the UK that can operate data centre services at the speed and quality of the cloud providers. The UK/EU needs it's own GCP/AWS/Azure alternatives. Unfortunately there's not really anyone close.

[willtemperley]

Sounds like you've already captiulated to big tech.

Governements could and absolutely should be subsidisng home-grown data centres. And taxing the hell out of every square metre of AWS and Google data centres. Why not have a data tax for foreign companies?

[jszymborski]

Sure! I'm just talking about data residence. They can transfer data over the internet (or some inter-hospital network) no problem. It's just a matter of "local-first".