Data sovereignty driving data management and infrastructure plans, reveals Pure Storage study

A recent study by Pure Storage and the University of Sydney reveal how geopolitical uncertainty and regulatory evolution are transforming data sovereignty from a compliance issue into a fundamental business risk affecting competitiveness, innovation, and customer trust revealed.

Pure Storage recently announced that it recorded double digit growth in its last quarter. What makes it more interesting is that its storage as a service offering is growing twice as fast with the APAC region driving the adoption faster compared to other regions.

In Singapore, the vendor recorded a 18.7% growth for the second quarter of 2025. Unsurprisingly, the growth in the country is in line with the AI adoption the country is facing as well. In fact, the Asia Pacific region as a whole is seeing increase spending in AI, with cybersecurity concerns driving increasing investment in backup and storage with AI.

At the same time, a recent study by Pure Storage and the University of Sydney reveal how geopolitical uncertainty and regulatory evolution are transforming data sovereignty from a compliance issue into a fundamental business risk affecting competitiveness, innovation, and customer trust revealed.

According to the study, there is a "perfect storm" potentially in the making as all respondents from the nine countries in the survey have concerns about sovereignty risks. These industry leaders feel potential service disruption has forced them to reconsider where data is located.

Not only have 92% said geopolitical shifts are increasing sovereignty risks, 92% also warned inadequate sovereignty planning could lead to reputational damage. As such, 78% are already embracing different data strategies, such as implementing multi service provider strategies; adopting sovereign data centers; and embedding enhanced governance requirements in commercial agreements

Put simply, the concerns for data sovereignty are seeing organizations now focused on driving their AI transformation locally, either on premises or on the cloud, within the regulated environment. Organizations are also concerned that they could face potential revenue loss, regulatory penalties, and irreparable damage to stakeholder trust if these risks are not proactively addressed.

For Matthew Oostveen, Chief Technology Officer & Vice President, Asia Pacific & Japan, at Pure Storage, there are basically three routes' organizations can take to deal with this scenario. First, they obviously do nothing to their current infrastructure and hope its not impacted. Second, they can move towards a hybrid approach in their data management and third, organizations can opt for complete sovereign control.

Oostveen believes the change in the landscape, especially with AI driving how data is used and managed will require improved latency, performance, security while also keeping costs at a minimal. And this is also where he believes the push for data sovereignty will be the catalyst of change for how organizations manage their data.

He believes organizations should navigate data sovereignty by adopting best practices like running a risk assessment on how their data is managed, including the infrastructure that’s being used, consider hybrid approaches, evaluate sovereign service provider programs and be prepared for regulatory evolution.

As such, this is also where Oostveen believes data sovereignty requirements will need organizations to have a new vision in data infrastructure. Tools like Pure Storage’s Enterprise Data Cloud provide a unified data plane and a unified management plane that enables customers to have the appropriate level of visibility across the entire portfolio. The industry first intelligence control point breaks down silos in infra and enables customers to look at all that infra as one unified cloud.

The Pure Storage Platform enables organizations to make full use of what AI can offer, streamlining workflows across on-premises and cloud environments. Among the new enhancements announced include the general availability of the Pure Storage Cloud Azure Native.

Offered as a fully managed Azure native service with enterprise-grade resiliency and efficiency, the program allows customers to reduce overhead, seamlessly migrate without refactoring, and decouple storage from compute.