Integrity is everything when talking about data. A simple loss could mean fatality, more than ever if it escapes your own jurisdiction. And what a scare if you here the statement: if US wants your data, they can get it.

Without a guarantee that data would not leave the European soil, defense giant BAE will no longer proceed with the Microsoft Office 365 deal. The London-based company dismisses possibility of outsourcing mission-critical data to this Microsoft cloud-based solution, citing fears that the USA PATRIOT ACT could exploit privileges. For a company that sells weapons and machinery of defense to several governments around the globe, a single glitch in data security could liquefy their honour, hence their business.

BAE’s head for strategy and design, Charles Newhouse explained why their organization was directed to that decision. He said, “A number of high profile outages that users have suffered recently demonstrated just how little control you actually have. When it all goes horribly wrong, you just sit there and hope it is going to get better.”

Newhouse chronicled how they went on to conduct researches and what others have to say about the controversial US Patriot Act: “I was on a study tour recently, and 85 percent of European companies out on that, now cite international regulations being their major issue. Everyone was ‘on about’ the U.S. Patriot Act, saying that the geo-location of that data and who has access to that data is the number one killer for adopting to the public cloud at the moment.”

The decision arrived at the table after consulting a lawyer. He added, “We had these wonderful conversations with Microsoft where we were going to adopt Office 365 for some of our ‘unrestricted’ stuff, and it was all going to be brilliant. I went back and spoke to the lawyers and said, “It’s Ireland” [the datacenter], and should that fail, then it will go to Holland. And the lawyers asked what happened if they lose Holland?”

Especially in foreign nations, the Patriot Act has become a kind of label for security concerns, no different from hackers. BAE ditching Microsoft Office 365 solutions is just one of the many casualties among American cloud services providers that want to sell their solutions outside the United States, but are governed by this law.

In July, Kit Dotson of SiliconANGLE reported that the Patriot Act could actually halt any transactions that Microsoft cloud-operations would have with EU. True enough, the implications of the decree turned off BAE.

European and Asian cloud markets are budding rapidly. And, while they desire to hire services of US-based biggies to support their growth, they abhor the thought of having their data leaked outside their territories. For Microsoft and other US tech companies, this is a marketing constraint—maybe the hardest to surmount. The US and EU regulations have been clashing for a long time now. The concerns on where the data will be stored and processed are no new issues. Unless they meet halfway, or US bends over, which is unlikely to happen any time soon, public cloud’s development could be more sluggish.