Call it part of the cost of doing business as a software provider in this cloud-obsessed decade. ESET has joined the growing ranks of companies moving into an in-country Canadian data centre.

Bob Bonneau, country manager for ESET Canada, said he first brought up the subject with his higher-ups in the company 18 months ago, recognizing running its apps on Canadian soil as “an emerging requirement in our market.” While a Canuck data centre started on the “nice-to-have” list, Bonneau said with legislation and cultural changes, it has quickly made its way on the need-to-have list. 

“It was no longer competitive to have [Canadian customers] just hosted in the US, although we were compliant,” Bonneau said. “We felt the pressure of that gap in the market starting at the tail end of last year.”

ESET is officially a “freedom of choice” vendor, offering customers the choice of running in the cloud or on-premise. However, Bonneau reported that the company’s Canadian sales are about 70 percent cloud-based, with “close to 100 percent of new customers in the cloud.”

New customers will be able to locate their information in ESET’s data centres in Canada, the US, or Europe, though Bonneau said the expectation is that “almost all of them” will opt for the Canadian servers. While the initial focus is on those new customers or new applications, Bonneau said the company is “working through migration path options” for existing Canadian customers currently hosted in the US or elsewhere.

The spectre of data sovereignty laws in Quebec, where ESET has significant business in the public sector and education, was one of the critical drivers of the decision to move customer data in-country, as was the growing prevalence of large tenders that consider Canadian data storage and management a “must-have” check box.

“Even when it’s not a requirement [to be hosted in a Canadian data centre,] it’s a differentiator,” Bonneau said.

Although Bonneau said the Canadian subsidiary is “off to a good start of the year in terms of growth,” he said not being on Canadian soil has cost the company some business at the beginning of the year.

“We’ve seen some customer attrition as a result of not having this, so now we’re shored up on that end,” he said.

He said he believed that being able to “check the box” of a Canadian hosting option would help the company and its partners on sales calls and let partners pursue new business more aggressively, particularly with larger customers.

ESET’s new Canadian data centre is located in the Greater Toronto Area.