Next year all information held by the Family Court will be moved into cloud servers owned by Microsoft. The move is the first phase of the judiciary's Te Au Reka project, which will see the entire courts system move online and away from piecemeal and paper-based, which is contributing to lengthy delays in the justice system.
Microsoft is confirmed as the cloud provider for Te Au Reka for the project. The government has about 200 agencies under orders to shift their storage and processing to the cloud, and many have already made the move. And while storing data in the cloud isn't a new concept - data sovereignty experts are concerned what the move could mean for some of the population's most sensitive information.
Legal opinion sought by a local cloud company at the time the project was being procured stated the only way to ensure total data sovereignty would be to hold the information in servers based in New Zealand and owned by a New Zealand company.
Dr Karaitiana Taiuru is a data sovereignty expert with expertise in Māori data sovereignty, and George Sadlier who worked for 15 years on cloud tech for Google and Microsoft.
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