To tap into the growing demand to solve data sovereignty issues in the Middle East, San Francisco-based tech startup InCountry has opened its Middle East headquarters at Hub71 in Abu Dhabi. Samer Kamal, InCountry's vice president of products, told TechRadar Middle East that data protection and privacy are hot topics around the world for businesses and consumers. The introduction of the GDPR in 2018 had a significant impact on the protection of personal data and the demand for expertise in confidentiality matters subsequently exploded. The increase in data breaches has forced many cloud providers to have data centers in each country to comply with data residency laws. More than 80 countries have adopted comprehensive data protection laws. “Businesses are growing and going to more than one country and we help them comply with data residency regulations, especially in emerging countries. We have a data residency platform as a service that securely stores and processes data in the country of origin,” he said. In addition, he said that companies do not need to move the entire stack or rebuild the entire stack when they move to another country. "Once installed in one country, it works all over the world," he said. InCountry is backed by Caffeinated Capital, Felicis Ventures, Arbor Ventures, Ridge Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, Charles River Ventures, Global Founders Capital, Parade Ventures, Mubadala Ventures and MState. The startup is present in more than 70 countries and Kamal said it plans to be present in around 100 countries by the end of the year.
Understand local requirements
The advantage of InCountry, Kamal said, is that they provide not only technical solutions but also people on the ground within the legal and regulatory framework of all these countries to understand exactly what the local requirements are. “Many local companies don't know what the local data residency laws are and we clearly know what will happen. So companies can focus on global expansion without hiring compliance staff or rebuilding all their solutions in multiple countries,” he said InCountry works with hyperscale cloud providers such as IBM, AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure in the Gulf countries and with the Saudi Telecom Company (STC) in Saudi Arabia.In countries that do not have hyperscale providers, Kamal said that co-located service providers work. "We will announce a partnership with a local provider who has partnerships with governments and the Ministry of Health in Abu Dhabi and where we will allow clients to work with them. If a customer prefers to work with other cloud providers, that's fine with us and we can work with any cloud provider," he said. Salesforce only works in six data centers around the world, but in partnership with InCountry, Kamal said which are now present in 70 countries.
Strategic growth area
InCountry's clients are in highly regulated industries such as the public sector, government entities, healthcare, banking and finance. “We see the Middle East as a very strategic area right now. We are barely a year old, but we are witnessing tremendous growth,” Kamal said. When asked who should be blamed for the rape, he replied that it was a "shared responsibility." "We let our customers know where our responsibility lies and where the responsibility of the cloud provider also comes into play, and at the same time, the customer is also responsible for a lot of things," he said. He added that InCountry supports regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Service Organization Control 2 (SOC 2) and the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard.