Ever read the fine print on the regulatory compliance rules for storing customers’ data? It may be wise to give it a once-over before pulling the plug on the physical data center and throwing everything in the public cloud. Rules and regulations about where and how data can be stored are a major concern for some companies, and they could throw a wrench in cloud migration.

Neil Mendelson, VP of Big Data and Advanced Analytics at Oracle, warns that regulations can be prohibitive — if not now, then possibly in the future due to unforeseen changes. “Look at what happened a few months ago with the Brexit — all of a sudden, it was OK to have the data as long as it was in the EU. Well, the EU is now shifting, so where does the data go?”

Mendelson told John Furrier (@furrier), of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during a special On-the-Ground segment at Oracle’s Redwood Shores Headquarters that Oracle’s Cloud Machine gives customers the same technology they get in the public cloud in their own data center behind their firewall. This will allow them to take advantage of cloud services and a subscription model without the potential compliance snafus.

He said that Oracle will be making announcements about special Cloud Machine versions, including a Big Data Cloud Machine, at the OpenWorld conference.

Shifting sands

Mendelson has another cautionary tale for companies: Those using open source software at the low levels could get stuck in a technology that has become obsolete. His advice is to go with a company that is flexible about what technologies it uses in the solutions it brings to market.

He contended that Oracle is such a company. “If tomorrow Spark gets replaced with Flink or something else, we simply replace the code generator underneath, and all of what the customer built gets preserved and moved into the future,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview with Neil Mendelson below:

Photo by SiliconANGLE