"As long as you are connected to the internet, data localisation doesn't make a difference [to cyber security]," Manu Zacharia, the president of the Indian Security Research Organisation (ISRA) said at Nullcon 2020. Speaking at a panel on the "Economics of Data Breach", fellow panelist Yash Kadakia, founder of and chief technology officer at Security Brigade, said that the problem, in fact, will get worse since the effectiveness of hackers' monitoring will improve. "Hackers will now know that if they want Indian data, they have to attack these servers, if they want Chinese data, they have to attack these servers, etc.," he explained. Suchit Mishra, the chief information security officer at Autonomous Intelligent Driving (AID) GmbH, argued that the primary aim behind data localisation was censorship and that most regulations do not understand how technologies actually work. "It is consumers' data. Let them decide where they want their data to be," he said. In a later email to MediaNama, Kadakia said, "Having to host separate copies of data in each country, would increase the cost and effort it takes for companies to secure the same data. i.e. having to secure and monitor 20 different independent data stores is much harder and a lot more expensive than a few consolidated data stores. Moreover, today organizations need to store and secure data as per the highest common denominator - in-terms of compliance standards vs otherwise lax local standards that may come into play with data localization. [sic]" Regulation and an interwoven cyber security approach…
