NetSuite Speeds Data-Center Rollout Amid NSA Spying

Cloud application vendor NetSuite is accelerating its construction of data centers in Europe as a result of the National Security Agency's eavesdropping activities.

Zach Nelson, the company's chief executive, said that prospective customers in Europe have grown more concerned about whether the US government could access proprietary information stored in data centers around the world. "There's now a higher level of concern about keeping data in Europe," he said. Edward Snowden’s revelations are particularly thorny for companies like NetSuite, which store data and applications used by businesses on remote servers around the world, which their customers can access via the Internet. Businesses, particularly outside the US, are loath to let the government pry into their activities. According to Nelson, NetSuite will add two new data centers in 2014, picking two from among prospective locations in Germany, the Netherlands and Ireland. NetSuite would have built the new data centers regardless, said Nelson, but has sped up its expansion as a result of concerns about the NSA. Nelson said he believes the company "will have the same issue in Asia."