Rapid digitization has accelerated cross-border data flows, compelling organizations to reconcile heterogeneous privacy regimes while deploying scalable cloud infrastructures. This review synthesizes comparative insights on major data protection frameworks including the EU General Data Protection Regulation, the UK Data Protection Act, the United States sectoral model, Canada’s PIPEDA, and emerging African and Asia-Pacific regulations to identify convergences, divergences, and practical implications for secure cloud adoption. The study evaluates legal principles such as lawful processing, consent, data minimization, accountability, data subject rights, breach notification, and international transfer mechanisms, and maps them to technical and organizational controls required in modern cloud architectures. A systematic narrative review approach was applied to peer-reviewed literature, regulatory guidance, and industry standards, including ISO/IEC 27001, ISO/IEC 27701, NIST SP 800-53, and the Cloud Security Alliance Cloud Controls Matrix. Findings reveal increasing global alignment around risk-based governance, privacy-by-design, encryption, identity and access management, auditability, and continuous monitoring. However, significant differences persist in enforcement intensity, localization requirements, cross-border transfer restrictions, and liability allocation between controllers and processors. These disparities complicate multi-jurisdictional cloud deployments and demand adaptive compliance strategies. The review proposes an integrated framework linking legal obligations with secure cloud implementation practices. Core strategies include data classification and mapping, zero-trust architecture, strong encryption and key management, privacy-enhancing technologies, automated compliance monitoring, and contractual safeguards such as standard contractual clauses and data processing agreements. The framework emphasizes shared responsibility models and the need for governance structures that integrate legal, technical, and operational perspectives. Overall, the study demonstrates that effective cloud adoption in regulated environments requires harmonizing regulatory intelligence with robust cybersecurity and privacy engineering. Organizations that embed comparative regulatory analysis into cloud design processes can reduce compliance risk, strengthen trust, and enable secure innovation across jurisdictions. The paper contributes a consolidated perspective for policymakers, researchers, and practitioners seeking to navigate evolving global data protection landscapes while maintaining resilient, secure, and compliant cloud ecosystems. Future research should examine automated policy translation, sovereign cloud models, and cross-border regulatory sandboxes to support interoperable compliance and resilient digital economies worldwide. The findings highlight needs for skills, governance maturity, and stakeholder collaboration across public and private sectors.
Mbonu et al. (Sun,) studied this question.