Data Locality is going to continue to be a strong driver for cloud providers getting a presence in different countries.
It feels like it's post-Snowden (but it may be I wasn't paying enough attention before then), but more and more countries have been passing data locality laws and are less willing to have their data residing in the US.
Well, in theory, US companies could still leak user data out, but the consequences are dire if Canada (or whoever) finds out. On the other hand, if Canadian user data is stored in AWS US East for example, then Canada can do absolutely nothing from a legal standpoint.
If the US government did demand data stored in Canada from a US company in contravention of Canadian law, wouldn't they just include a gag order so the US company can't tell their customer about it? And since the vast majority of the US company's assets and operations are in the US, they wouldn't dare stand up to the US government.
It feels like it's post-Snowden (but it may be I wasn't paying enough attention before then), but more and more countries have been passing data locality laws and are less willing to have their data residing in the US.