There's a "new twist" in the world of cloud computing. According to a widely circulated report from Bloomberg, outfits in the U.K. and Canada are now adding language to their contracts with technology suppliers stipulating that their data mustn't be stored on U.S. soil – something Bloomberg paints as a reaction to revelations of NSA snooping that arrived this year by way of former government contractor Edward Snowden.

But the reality is that this new twist isn't all that new. Never mind that Bloomberg's story provides little hard information and reads a bit like an advertisement for the security company that serves as its primary source. For years, U.S. cloud operations – including those run by internet giants Amazon, Google, and Microsoft – have faced widespread concerns that data hosted on their services could wind up in the hands of the feds, with many foreign companies refusing to use machines located in the U.S. And for years, the cloud giants have worked to quell these concerns. It's just that, now, they must work even harder.

The issue here is the same as it has always been: Can the Googles and the Microsofts finds ways of engendering confidence in their cloud services? Can they convince the business world that their services offer reliable protection for the data they house? Can they effectively push back against government efforts to take hold of that data – push back not only technically but politically?

In the past, it's now clear, they haven't quite been up to the task. But the good news is that, in the wake of Snowden's revelations, the cloud giants have redoubled their efforts – or at least they say they have.

"It gave Microsoft a wake-up call," Microsoft Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich told us earlier this month, in describing Microsoft's new plans to thwart government snooping, including the decision to encrypt all information traveling between its data centers. Outfits such as Google have made similar noises.

But let's not pretend they're fighting a new problem. Overseas outfits have been wary of storing data on U.S.-based machines since the arrival of the Patriot Act a decade ago – a change in U.S. law that gave the feds new powers to grab data stored with American companies. A good two years ago, British defense contractor BAE openly revealed it had killed plans to adopt Microsoft's Office 365 cloud service because the American software giant couldn't guarantee that its data wouldn't leave Europe and wind up on machines in the U.S.

Even before Snowden's revelations, the European Union was fashioning legislation that would seek to regulate the use of overseas cloud services, and companies such as Microsoft have long struggled to accommodate the particularly stringent privacy laws and attitudes in Europe. Meanwhile, the Chinese government won't even allow U.S. companies to operate cloud services on Chinese soil, and as a result, the likes of Amazon and Microsoft are now partnering with local Chinese companies in the hopes of gaining a foothold in the country.

Offering cloud services to overseas customers has never been an easy task for U.S. companies. And it goes without saying that much of the difficulty stemmed from the U.S. government's determination to get its hands on internet data in the same of national security. But it's worth remembering that, according to reports, the U.S. government is also snooping in other countries and that other governments are doing their own snooping, as was underlined yesterday in a report from Der Spiegel that describes a litany of surveillance programs from the NSA and beyond.

Yes, the world's businesses can keep their data on their own machines, but this carries its own risks. You can certainly argue that, more so than the average company, the giants of the web have the brains needed to tackle modern security problems, and even more so than in the past, these giants are motivated to quell the concerns that have always been there.

"Companies like Google and Microsoft have to worry about their entire overseas business being destroyed," says Matthew Green, an assistant research professor at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute who has closely followed the NSA scandal. "I think these companies are realizing that overseas cloud services are some huge percentage of their future revenue – or hoping, anyway – and they're trying to be proactive, to take active steps to protect their business overseas."

But that's not to say that they'll succeed. The task ahead is enormous. It always has been.