Data sovereignty is one of the biggest barriers to the Australian Crime Commission, putting all of its data on a shared cloud system, Narelle Lovett, CTO of the agency has told FutureGov. Third party servers for cloud are often placed in another country, she said, so Australia may face challenges if the government in that jurisdiction asks for information hosted on the servers. “There’s a court case in Ireland at the moment where the US government is asking Microsoft for Irish data,” she said. “One of the reasons we haven't moved to cloud is because of the data sovereignty issue... it has to be on Australian soil.” Although the country has adopted a cloud first policy, Lovett said that while “we respect the cloud first policy, some data just doesn't work for us. A lot of our data is other peoples’ data, so we don’t own it,” she said, highlighting the Australian Criminal Intelligence Database and the Australian Law Enforcement Intelligence Network. The agency finds that implementation of shared services is also a challenge because other agencies do not realise the importance of full integration. “Standardising those business processes is going to be a huge task, particularly if you want to try and consolidate”.