The great escape: How the NSA is driving companies out of US clouds

Edward Snowden's claim -- that the National Security Agency conducts industrial espionage, routinely collecting information from non-US companies that have little apparent intelligence value -- may leave US cloud providers with a black eye if many of their European customers decide to bail.

Such details are likely to make non-US companies all the more skittish about storing their data in clouds run by US companies. In fact, the backlash may already be well underway to move to non-US cloud companies whenever possible. Some cloud companies are already girding to avoid losing business, if they have any say in the matter. The long-term answer for non-US customers, then, may be cloud firms founded and run by non-US companies. But that raises even more questions: Who to replace them with, and where would they be from?