Can "cloud soverieignty" keep Canadian data safe from global hacks?

Montreal cloud computing company CloudOps and Chatham, Ontario-based independent telecom provider Teksavvy are partnering to scale cloud.ca, an independent cloud infrastructure services company, in order to give Canadian businesses a stronger domestic platform on which they can more securely innovate on the global stage.
The coordinated DDoS attack last week on Dyn, Inc.’s Managed DNS infrastructure based in the Eastern U.S., which temporarily shut down many of the internet’s most prominent sites including Shopify, Reddit, Spotify, and Twitter, has spooked many into doubting the wisdom of putting all their inernet eggs into one cloud-based managed services basket.
“Our real point of differentiation isn’t just cloud servers in Canada,” said Mike Gero, VP of Product and Business Development at cloud.ca. “It’s the ownership, control and personalized service that are Canadian, too. Canada can innovate with the best of them — and cloud.ca can provide that platform.”
cloud.ca’s Internet-as-a-Service platform appears to be a well-timed answer to the question of whether or not it’s a great idea to run a business on servers south of the border, or to use their term, to reclaim “end-to-end data sovereignty” over how our data crosses borders.
“The cloud.ca partnership between TekSavvy and CloudOps brings together leaders in regional networking, data centre, and cloud IaaS that offers a unique competitive advantage for jurisdiction-conscious Canadian customers,” said Philbert Shih, Managing Director of Toronto-based independent research and consulting firm focused on hosting and cloud infrastructure, Structure Research.
TekSavvy has successfully cultivated a reputation for independence, having been part of a coalition of small telcos that fought and won an appeal against it by Bell Canada to keep independent providers from using its high-speed broadband networks.
TekSavvy was founded in 1998, and now employs more than 500 people in Chatham, Ontario and Gatineau, Quebec, providing service to more than 250,000 Canadian homes, along with its business and wholesale offerings.
“Combining our two companies’ expertise creates an ideal synergy,” said CloudOps CEO Ian Rae. “TekSavvy’s network services and relationships with state-of-the-art data centres provide the perfect foundation and competitive advantage for cloud.ca.”
With increased demand by Canadian businesses requiring that all or some of their data remain within Canadian borders, cloud.ca offers an assurance that data kept on its servers meets security, compliance, and privacy requirements, while also avoiding the risk of falling under foreign control.
“Piece by piece, TekSavvy is taking the values that have driven its consumer success and applying them to the business services arena to create the kind of resilient, trusted services needed to innovate efficiently,” said TekSavvy CIO Pascal Tellier. “We’re thrilled to partner with CloudOps on cloud.ca to offer our valued customers and the market a scalable, high-performance and resilient cloud computing service at competitive pricing.”
Whether the appeal to independence, in either a national or “free from the Big Telcos” sense, or nationalism, for either patriotic or pragmatic reasons, is enough to appeal to a large enough user base of Canadian businesses to keep cloud.ca viable remains an open question.
But these two Canadian independents have just opened the skies a little as part of that ongoing battle.