#data-residency

#data-residency

Earlier this year, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the availability of the Well‑Architected Data Residency with Hybrid Cloud Services Lens, a new extension of the AWS Well‑Architected Framework aimed at helping organizations design and operate hybrid cloud workloads that must comply with complex data residency and sovereignty requirements. The announcement underscores AWS's growing focus on governance, regulatory compliance, and hybrid operations as enterprises increasingly balance cloud adoption with on‑premises and geopolitical data constraints.

"With Microsoft 365 Copilot, agencies can streamline citizen services by drafting responses and summarizing case files in minutes," the blog post said. "They can empower staff to manage budgets effectively by analyzing spending trends and generating compliance-ready reports, all within the Microsoft 365 apps where they already work today." GCC-High agencies, Microsoft said, will now be able to access a host of features that "are available or have begun rolling out." These include integrated AI capabilities within other Microsoft products, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams.

Enterprises can move from small pilots to full deployments without violating their jurisdiction's rules on where data should live. The reality is that, earlier, most security and compliance teams weren't rejecting GenAI because of model design; they were rejecting it because storing data in the US or EU pushed them into conflict with GDPR, India's incoming DPDPA norms, UAE's federal rules, or sector-specific mandates like PCI-DSS,

Across Europe and globally, organisations face rising regulatory demands, resilience expectations, and rapid tech innovation. Governments and enterprises need the cloud's power without losing control of their data. The announcement includes the commitment to the EU Data Boundary, which ensures that data processed by AI services for EU customers remains within the European Union. According to the company, this means that all customer data, whether at rest or in transit, will be stored and processed exclusively in the EU, unless customers explicitly direct otherwise.

Historically, many enterprises have avoided multicloud deployments, citing complexity in managing multiple platforms, compliance challenges, and security concerns. However, as the need for specialized solutions grows, businesses are realizing that a single vendor can't meet their workload demands. In practice, this may look like using AWS for machine learning hardware, Google Cloud for Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), or IBM's industry-specific solutions for sensitive data.

"We do understand that you have sovereign obligations and we're designing our solutions so that regardless of your industry you are in control."