As organisations expand across borders, their data governance strategies must evolve to address the unique demands of each region in which they operate. Beyond the foundational elements of data stewardship, quality management, and protection, effective governance frameworks need to account for data sovereignty and data residency – two key principles that ensure data adheres to local laws and remains within the appropriate geographic boundaries.
Microsoft Purview’s compliance boundaries offer a solution that enables organisations to confidently manage data across multiple regions while respecting these regional requirements.
Today, we’ll break down the concepts of data sovereignty and data residency, explain how Purview’s compliance boundaries can streamline compliance, and discuss why these boundaries are especially crucial for complex processes like eDiscovery.
What is Data Sovereignty?
Data sovereignty is the principle that data must adhere to the laws and governance structures of the country where it’s collected and/or stored. This is particularly relevant for organisations operating in multiple jurisdictions, as each country has its own legal and regulatory requirements around data privacy, security, and access.
Compliance with data sovereignty rules ensures that data handling respects national laws, often requiring organisations to store data locally and manage international transfers carefully to meet legal standards.
In data governance, understanding and following data sovereignty rules helps organisations navigate the complexities of regional compliance. For example, a US-based organisation operating in Europe must comply with both GDPR in the EU and relevant US data privacy laws, often involving strategies to keep data within specific borders and to secure cross-border transfers in line with international legal requirements.
What is Data Residency?
Data residency refers to the specific geographic location where data is physically stored. Unlike data sovereignty, which focuses on legal compliance, data residency is all about ensuring data stays within designated boundaries to meet local regulatory requirements. Many regions mandate that certain types of data must remain within their borders, which helps mitigate risks associated with cross-border transfers.
To comply with data residency requirements, organisations often use regional data centres and adapt their data architecture and management strategies to align with local laws. Planning for data residency is crucial for businesses that need to operate smoothly within specific jurisdictions while meeting regulatory demands.
What are Microsoft Purview compliance boundaries
Microsoft Purview offers a powerful data governance solution designed to address multi-cloud, on-premises, and SaaS environments. Compliance boundaries are a core feature within Purview, empowering organisations to manage data based on region-specific regulations.
These compliance boundaries allow you to establish clear separations within your data environment, ensuring that sensitive data remains within the required jurisdictions. This approach simplifies the complexities of international compliance, helping you stay on the right side of regulations while minimising the risk of costly breaches.
With Purview’s compliance boundaries, you can:
- Enforce data residency requirements.
- Manage and monitor data flows by region.
- Ensure that data usage and access are compliant with local regulations.
- Maintain a consistent governance framework across different jurisdictions.
Why compliance boundaries matter
By protecting data residency and sovereignty, compliance boundaries enable organisations to store data within required geographic locations and to comply with regional laws. But compliance boundaries go beyond storage; they’re also key to controlling how data is accessed, searched, and exported during processes like eDiscovery.
Data residency and sovereignty laws can complicate eDiscovery processes when investigations span multiple jurisdictions. Compliance boundaries address these challenges by creating logical divisions within the organisation, controlling which data can be searched and who has access to eDiscovery cases.
With these boundaries in place, organisations can control access to content based on geographic location, ensuring that searches and exports align with data residency laws. For example, compliance boundaries allow eDiscovery managers to limit their search to specific data locations (such as mailboxes, SharePoint sites, or OneDrive accounts) within a designated region, ensuring that sensitive information remains within the required geographic borders.
This can be particularly important in cases where data may otherwise be exposed to regions with problematic regulations, such as the U.S.A which can compel U.S.-based companies to share data with government agencies, even if that data belongs to foreign entities or is stored abroad.
Ready to reinforce your data governance?
Microsoft Purview’s compliance boundaries offer powerful tools for managing data across borders, making them especially valuable for multi-national organisations. However, deploying Purview effectively can be challenging, requiring not only expert technical skill, but also the ability to get diverse business stakeholders to align on complex governance objectives.
Without clear collaboration and focus, organisations risk falling short of Purview’s full potential.
Cloud Essentials can help by bringing the right stakeholders together, clarifying your business needs, and aligning them with Purview’s functionality. Through our Data Governance Accelerator Programme, we help develop an optimised roadmap tailored to your unique compliance requirements, ensuring your organisation achieves maximum value from its Microsoft investment while fully supporting its international data governance goals.
