Waters’ comments coincide with Data Privacy Day in Australia yesterday and he says that in recent years, data privacy compliance has become a critical consideration driving critical business decisions as companies look to digitally transform.

“The Data Privacy Day comes as a reminder for organisations to assess their cyber risks and ensure strong data privacy protections are in place but in such a way that will not impede innovation within the digital economy,” cautions Waters.

“Due to the increasing complexity of data flows, enterprises need to evolve past securing data at rest to a posture of continuous governance where all data is protected.

“Increasingly, we are seeing enterprises place, manage and analyse data at the edge, closer to their users, services and clouds.

“Meanwhile, concerns over the security and privacy of data in movement and/or in the cloud have also increased. This situation is more critical in Asia-Pacific and has driven the need for better technology and infrastructure solutions that improve data accessibility, security and control, while also meeting increasing data privacy requirements. It is a balancing act.

“At Equinix, we support many of the largest enterprises in the world. Through our Equinix Privacy Office, we proactively manage our own compliance with applicable new and evolving data privacy laws and seek to assist customers to do the same. Our data security practices and controls around our own global platform of systems and processes are robust.

“Our digital services like Network Edge and a rich set of security-focused partners in our ecosystem, which sets up these security services closer to the user to protect that data locally. Our goal is to embed the concept of privacy by design into new system deployments and business process improvements across various aspects of our business, as well as offer our clients systems and infrastructure they can rely on,” concluded Waters.